Two winters ago, Danny’s Tavern cheated death. The bar on Chicago’s North Side seemed doomed for demolition; headlines called it official, and event organizers spread word of formal farewells. It was saved at the 11th hour by an outpouring of public testimonial and an owner’s promise to fix its deteriorating roof. Playing out in the year before the iconic nearby venue Double Door was shuttered, it was a major victory for Chicago music. A winter night at Danny’s can feel like stepping into a long-exposure photograph: The place glows, both by spare candlelight and from the memory of all the music its walls and dancefloors have soaked up in the past three decades. Tucked into the middle of a quiet residential block, it rarely hosts live-band performances, yet it’s a premier place to listen.
All of this is essential context for the new mixtape by the Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. Recorded at the bar on a below-freezing night last November, 12 days after a nightmarish presidential election, Highly Rare finds McCraven and his band leaning into the winter night to deftly explore sanctuary, silence, and a looming sense that the roof might be caving in on all of us.
McCraven is a beat architect whose craft is threefold. He’s a drummer and bandleader first, but his voice doesn’t really materialize until after sounds are laid to tape—in this case, a Tascam four-track. As a producer, McCraven sifts through, chops up, and reassembles the improvisations of his own band, which here comprises three fellow top-talent players from the local recording company International Anthem. Manipulating their spontaneous takes, he transforms the improvised raw material into a carefully edited statement made out of free-form parts.
The finished product is somehow both more rhythmic and elusive than its origins. Highly Rare finds a dark aisle between free jazz and hip-hop and traverses it restlessly, breaking down the division between the two forms. On “Above & Beyond,” the record’s foremost feet-mover, Nick Mazzarella’s alto sax jumps between precisely inflected phrases and throaty wails into the void. The next track, “Venus Rising,” begins with McCraven’s skittering drumbeat quietly underscoring bleary-eyed groans from Mazzarella’s sax and Ben LaMar Gay’s cornet—then slowly wakes up, hoists itself up via Junius Paul’s bass, and snowballs into anxious chaos until the room spins.
McCraven’s touch isn’t limited to his arrangements, as he loops and shifts pieces around; it’s also audible in the finishing touches he puts on these sounds. His window-rattling beats sound magnetically attracted to the lo-fi nakedness layered on top of them. “Left Fields” grows from a thin-sounding seed of Gay chanting in circles over his own diddley bow, stretching out over 11 and a half minutes and eventually latching onto a booming four-on-the-floor infrastructure. Though the components were his to begin with, it’s as if McCraven is building music out of found objects—objects not planned in their particulars, but borne of the perfect environment, process, and night.
Night, above all, lights the way for Highly Rare. A track entitled “Icy Lightning” features Gay repeatedly calling out the titular phrase, which in its taunting cadence can easily be heard as a more ominous “I see lightning.” It’s a curiously fitting moment. McCraven moves confidently through a bleak landscape on Highly Rare, confronting nightmares by having fun in their face, toying with rhythmic conventions and taunting them with his gifts.
