Makaya McCraven was born in Paris on October 19, 1983, the son of the jazz drummer Stephen McCraven and the Hungarian singer Ágnes Zsigmondi. From the age of three he was raised in and around Amherst and Northampton, Massachusetts, in the Pioneer Valley, where his parents' circle included Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef; his father had played with Sam Rivers and Shepp. At five he played in his father's drum ensemble, the CMSS Bashers, and in middle school he and friends formed a band to back his mother's folk singing. In high school he started Cold Duck Complex, a jazz and hip-hop group that made three albums and opened regionally for hip-hop acts. He studied music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, played in the university jazz orchestra, and won several DownBeat student awards, but left without graduating.

In 2007 he moved to Chicago and worked through the city's jazz scene as a sideman, playing in the bands of guitarist Bobby Broom, trumpeter Corey Wilkes, pianist Willie Pickens, the Occidental Brothers, trumpeter Marquis Hill, and Jeff Parker. He also did studio work for Apollo Sunshine and Kris Delmhorst. His first leader album, the trio set Split Decision with bassist Tim Seisser and pianist Andrew Toombs, came out on Chicago Sessions in 2012. In January 2013 he began a weekly residency at a Ukrainian Village restaurant, The Bedford, with a rotating cast of Chicago players including Parker, bassist Joshua Abrams, and Hill. Engineer Dave Vettraino recorded all 28 shows over roughly a year, about 48 hours of music, and McCraven cut and rearranged it into the 19 tracks of In the Moment, released by the Chicago label International Anthem on January 20, 2015. A set of remixes followed in 2015, and a further 40 minutes of material came out in 2016 as In the Moment (E & F Sides).

That record-then-edit method became his signature. In 2016 his band played Danny's Tavern in Chicago with a four-track cassette recorder running, and he turned the lo-fi tape into Highly Rare (2017), first issued in September 2017 as a limited cassette on International Anthem. For Where We Come From (Chicago x London Mixtape) (2018) he recorded a London show in October 2017, with a band that included Kamaal Williams and Joe Armon-Jones on keyboards, saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Soweto Kinch, and tuba player Theon Cross, and handed the tape to a group of producers to chop and remix before reworking their versions himself. Universal Beings (October 26, 2018), a 22-track double album, gathered four groups recorded between August 2017 and January 2018 in New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles (the last at Parker's home in Altadena), among them harpist Brandee Younger, vibraphonist Joel Ross, cellist Tomeka Reid, saxophonists Shabaka Hutchings and Garcia, violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Parker, and percussionist Carlos Niño. It was nominated for Record of the Year at the 2019 Jazz Journalists Association awards, and a 26-minute documentary film about it, directed by Mark Pallman, followed in 2020. In 2016 he also toured mostly in Europe and played drums on Hill's The Way We Play for Concord, and he has performed with Kamasi Washington.

From 2019 he also took on projects built around other people's music. Moving Cities (2019) was a collaboration with the French trumpeter Antoine Berjeaut. In February 2020, ten years after the release of Gil Scott-Heron's final studio album I'm New Here, XL Recordings released We're New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, his reworking of that record with Younger, Parker, and Ben LaMar Gay among the contributors, built partly on samples from his father's recordings. Universal Beings E&F Sides (2020) collected leftover material from the 2018 sessions. In 2021 Blue Note gave him access to its vault for Deciphering the Message (November 19, 2021), thirteen reworkings of recordings by Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Dexter Gordon, Eddie Gale, Jack Wilson, and others, played with a studio band that included Parker, Hill, Ross, and bassist Junius Paul. In DownBeat's 2020 Critics Poll he won the Rising Star categories for best producer and best drummer.

In These Times (September 23, 2022), released by International Anthem, Nonesuch, and XL, was assembled over about seven years in five studios and four live spaces. It pairs his odd-meter compositions and edited beat music with larger ensemble and string arrangements, and features Parker, Younger, Ross, Paul, Hill, pianists Greg Spero and Rob Clearfield, saxophonist Greg Ward, and string players Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl, and Marta Sofia Honer, among others. He also produced Younger's Dorothy Ashby tribute Brand New Life (Impulse!, April 7, 2023). In January 2025 he marked the tenth anniversary of In the Moment with a residency at Winter Jazzfest in New York, and on October 17, 2025 he released Off the Record, a compilation of four EPs (PopUp Shop, Hidden Out!, Techno Logic, and The People's Mixtape) recorded at live shows between 2015 and 2025 in Venice (California), Chicago, London, Berlin, and New York, with players including Parker, Paul, Hill, Ross, Ben LaMar Gay, tuba player Theon Cross, and multi-instrumentalist Jeremiah Chiu. He is based in Chicago and is married to Nitasha Tamar Sharma, who as of 2018 was a professor of African American and Asian American studies at Northwestern University.

McCraven is a drummer first, trained in jazz and in the hip-hop tradition of sampling, and his records are best understood as both. He plays long sets with improvising bands, records them, then works as a producer in the studio, looping a phrase into a beat, layering overdubs, and arranging the results into tracks that a live band can later play again. AllMusic's Thom Jurek describes the music as a mix of jazz-funk, post-bop, and fusion with hip-hop and global rhythm, and calls the edit-heavy approach organic beat music; the title his own website first gave him was Beat Scientist. The production side is a large part of his identity: much of his catalog is built from edited live recordings rather than rehearsed studio dates, and he has also made remixes and reimaginings (for Gil Scott-Heron, Nubya Garcia, and the Blue Note catalog), so his work sits where jazz, hip-hop production, and electronic music meet. He is nonetheless widely treated as a jazz musician: he leads improvising ensembles, records for Blue Note, International Anthem, and Nonesuch, and has been honored in jazz critics' polls. He has named his father's jazz household, sample-based hip hop, and the jazz records that hip-hop producers sampled as formative, and he points to the history of tape loops and drum machines as part of the same lineage. He has said he chose Chicago over New York partly for its tradition of subversive, resistant music. Universal Beings averaged 86 out of 100 on Metacritic, and Pitchfork's Nate Chinen wrote that it joins ambient and hip-hop protocols with jazz fluency.