Quotes About Improvisation

When you see the same familiar faces, it's nice when you get a chance to play with the same musicians. You start to develop this shorthand so everybody knows where you're at and where you're going, but then again, there are always surprises. But the more people are comfortable with the material, the more free you can be with the music.

I usually know where I want to end up when I begin, but I have no idea how I'm going to get there... I don't write with an outline, and surprises happen on the way, and sometimes it changes.

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

Sometimes surprising an actor in a good way like that can actually create a response you're not expecting.

All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.

The positive emotions that arise in those unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevents these goals from being achieved.

The question, then, is not so much how to create the world as how to keep alive that moment of creation, how to realize that Coyote world in which creation never ends and people participate in the power of being creators, a world whose hopefulness lies in its unfinishedness, its openness to improvisation and participation. The revolutionary days I have been outlining are days in which hope is no longer fixed on the future: it becomes an electrifying force in the present.

The first was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos." He described how people took initiative, without leadership or coordination

We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. AGNES DE MILLE

Until the song is sung and the musicians have all gone home, not even you can tell which notes made the melody.

I hadn't planned on sounding like J.J. from Good Times, but that's the gist.

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

Parenting is like writing, most people just make it up as they go along.

Man, you can come see me six or seven times in a row and you'll never see the same show twice, because I don't like to be robotic onstage. I like to perform for that particular audience.

A crossbow?" Pigeon asked. I left my battle-ax in my other jeans," the man said.

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got The Devil Wears Prada, and its why I even got in the door for Mad Men.

Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that.

Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music man. It's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.

Civilization has gotten further and further from the so-called 'natural' man, who uses all his faculties: perception, invention, improvisation.

We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong!

The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.

When you don't have much money, you get creative. There's so much money that gets wasted on big movie sets. But when you don't have much money, you improvise.

Obviously when you're a teen you have no money, so you make, like, three outfits out of one dress. You're like, 'OK cut the arms here. Alright: New party, cut them to here.'