Dave MacRae

Who is Dave MacRae?

Dave MacRae is a keyboardist from New Zealand, noted for his contributions in jazz and his collaborations with people from the Canterbury scene.

MacRae studied at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music and then worked in Australia in the 1960s as an arranger for Festival Records. He moved to the United States in 1969, playing with experimental groups in Los Angeles before joining Buddy Rich's ensemble in 1970. He relocated to London in 1971, working that year with jazz musicians Clark Terry, Chet Baker, John Hendricks, and Gil Evans.

In 1971 he was briefly with a group called Caparius before he joined Matching Mole, where he remained until 1972. In March 1973 he recorded with Ian Carr's group Nucleus. Concurrently he played in and Elton Dean's band Just Us. He played in WMWM and Giles Farnaby's Dream Band in 1973 and did session work for Back Door in 1974, but left Nucleus around this time to concentrate on his own project called Pacific Eardrum, which he led with his wife Joy Yates until 1979. He continued working with Canterbury musicians such as Robert Wyatt, Mike Gibbs, and Richard Sinclair through the 1970s.

In the 1980s MacRae worked briefly with False Alarm and then played in a reconstituted version of Soft Machine in 1984. He returned to Australia later that year, and played in the Sydney area with Bernie McGann and Ronnie Scott.