Quotes About Improvisation

My uncle gave me a trumpet, but I loved the Louis Armstrong sound and the Harry James sound and I played by ear and I played always soulful or very direct from the gut.

When I worked with my uncle, I loved the fact that jazz music demanded that you use your own unique approach.

I do tend to think that I've written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don't know what a given character is going to say next.

I kept on buying records and listening to them. Finally, I was able to hear the relationship between the jazz improvisers' solos and the underlying structure that it's based on, the chord progression. That was pretty easy to do in the swing era, y'know, when jazz was, like, pop music, you know. It had made the charts and everything like that.

In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.

When I was working on 'Deadwood', it was understood that the script was a work in progress, and when we got to set, everyone would kind of work on it together.

There's a thrill in flying by the seat of your pants - trousers, actually: 'pants' in English means underwear - because most shows don't operate that way. Network shows are repetitive.

One cannot plan for the unexpected.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

Now and again, an actor will blow my mind by doing something really unexpected, like Mickey Rourke or Christopher Walken - you have absolutely no idea what they're going to do, which is really thrilling to watch.

In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.

As an MC, I come from a background where the onstage experience is freestyle-based: you never know who's going to join you on stage, or what you're gonna do, or how long you can stay on. You kind of lose that, once you get on to recording albums and going on tour. Doing Africa Express has brought me back to that excitement - for the unexpected.

When I'm playing, I'm never through. It's unfinished. I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. That's where the high comes in.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

In the music world, concerts unfold strictly according to plan. But, as I'd been finding out, in the book world, things keep changing by the second.

Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I'm always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in 'Body Double' did I discover that Maura's mother was a serial killer.

Italians are great improvisers. If something unforeseen happens, they throw up their hands, and they adjust.

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

Unfortunately, the public might not know that we get a script usually two days before shooting. So sometimes I'm shooting an episode and don't even know how it's going to end because I haven't read that yet.

The moment your kid's born you realize no one knows anything. No one goes to classes. You just have a kid. You can read all the books you like, but unfortunately none of our kids have read the books so they don't care. You're basically making it up as you go along.

My great overall skill is spontaneity and winging it!

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

There's nothing like the spontaneity of making something work on stage.

There is spontaneity to my work.