Universal Beings

"Universal Beings" is the title track from McCraven's 2018 project that captured recording sessions across four cities — London, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — with different collaborators in each location, resulting in music that carries the spirit of those specific rooms and relationships while being edited into something unified. The track embodies the album's central proposition: that jazz improvisation, treated with a producer's care in post-production, can speak to something universal in human experience. There's a sense of movement through the piece, of different voices finding common ground, as though you're witnessing the process of connection itself rather than just its result. The percussion is central and everywhere — not merely timekeeping but event-creating, shaping the emotional terrain. Harmonic richness comes from McCraven's collaborators, whose contributions have been rearranged and recontextualized but never stripped of their original feeling. It's music that rewards open attention that doesn't demand entertainment at every moment, that allows silence and space to be as meaningful as sound. Best experienced on a long journey, where the music can accompany actual movement through space.