Quotes About Improvisation

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

Most of my act is improvisation. I'm inspired for the moment. Standing there in front of 2,000 or 3,000 people you don't know can be pretty inspiring.

From the standpoint that you try to adjust your offense to your quarterback, you try to adjust your football team around your players. You do the best you can with the hand that you have, and you've got to add some parts along the way.

We all sit in front of our mics and our scripts lay on music stands. Then the silliness begins!

I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.

The impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit.

Where's jazz going? I don't know. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Very few battles are ever fought exactly as planned.

Because you don't live near a bakery doesn't mean you have to go without cheesecake.

If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.

Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things.

I will admit I am a little bit of a line fudger. I will change the line a bit to make it feel better in my mouth. That is something they'll allow you to do on 'Veep' unless it's a particular joke where they're like, 'No, it just sounds better like this.' But with a lot of network shows, the script is law; you cannot change it all.

The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.

Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.

When you're a co-host, you've got to consider what the other person is saying and take the next step and get the laugh or get to the end of the story. You've got to make it happen and then move on to the next story.

Teaching has made me realize that a lot of my fast playing is the musical equivalent of, 'Umm... umm... uhh...' - it's like when you're trying to think of the next thing to say that actually has meaning, you fill space. 'Umm' has about the same meaning as my fast playing.

A lot of guys come out, and they do the exact same thing, are in the exact same mood, and have the exact same entrance every night, I really just make up a lot of crap as I go along.

When the energy is really high, I feed off it. Those are the nights where I really take a left turn and we just go.

Well, every nights gonna be different. I dont even know what were going to play the next two nights. But thats the exciting part of it.

Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries.

There is no chance of retakes during live shows and that really challenges me.

I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going.