Makaya McCraven and the philosophy of improvisation

In the room is where it happens. On an icy November night in London, drummer and producer Makaya McCraven is commanding the dark club space of KOKO, pounding muscular grooves behind his kit while bassist Junius Paul interlocks with rooted rhythm, Matt Gold provides wafting reverb-laden melodics through his guitar and trumpeter Marquis Hill punctuates with soaring harmony.

Each drum-hit, note-strike and button-push is attuned to the specificity of the present moment, improvising from one phrase to the next to keep the 1500 people watching transfixed, head-nodding, hip-swaying.

“What happens in the room will dictate my choices,” McCraven says a few days before the performance, dressed in a flat cap and thick-rimmed glasses while speaking from his plush Amsterdam hotel room. “We’re on tour and we’re playing my recorded material, which is made up of edited and pieced-together recordings of previous improvised live sessions. Those produced recordings become solidified into compositions of their own and then when we go out onstage, we reinterpret them once more through the lens of improvisation and the feeling of the space. It’s a constantly evolving process and one we’re figuring out each time.”

Read the interview in The Line of Best Fit.

[This piece was published on 24/11/25]