Quotes About Improvisation

Musically, I always wanted to experiment.

I like living on that edge, musically. I like a bit of insecurity and that feeling of not really knowing what's going to happen.

I felt like for it to really turn into something, you have to jump in with both feet. And it always turns out a little different than you imagined it, but that's kind of the beauty of it, when you feel musically confident enough to just kind of follow where it goes.

I've never been a jam-band sort of musician.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

Yes, I'm a musician. I also like to play with others, sometimes more, sometimes less.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

I don't think I've ever been true to jazz. There's always a kind of jazz element to what I do. There are a very few genres that I haven't tried out, really, in what I've been doing. As a jazz musician, you can kind of mess about with things with a certain level of musicianship, which helps.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.

What intrigues me is that you get a good bunch of musicians together, and interesting things will happen.

I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.

Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.

I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.

Creating sounds together with other musicians is something I've always liked doing.

Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

It's a mystery to me why everybody doesn't love jazz. I've never been able to figure that out.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

A magic show and a concert are very similar in the way I like keeping things a mystery and not doing them the same way every time. The listener and the audience never know what's going to happen next.