The max-cut problem is to partition the vertices of a weighted graph G = (V,E) into two subsets such that the weight sum of the edges crossing the two subsets is maximized. This paper presents a memetic max-cut algorithm (MACUT) that relies on a dedicated multi-parent crossover operator and a perturbation-based tabu search procedure. Experiments on 30 G-set benchmark instances show that MACUT competes favorably with 6 state-of-the-art max-cut algorithms, and for 10 instances improves on the best known results ever reported in the literature.