Quotes About Improvisation

This is the point in the show where we say, 'Oh, what else do we have in the van that's flammable?'

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.

It kind of varies according to what I'm doing and what my situation is, but, most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing until the day of.

I've found that as I've learned to improvise melodically, it seems like I can come up with a bigger variety of stuff. I kind of selfishly enjoy it more, because I'm in the moment so much.

For me, theory has always opened things up to where I can walk into a room and just by hearing something I know exactly where to go on the guitar. I have a better time playing because I have a variety of colors to bring to the table.

I'm not playing a fixed character on 'Comedy Nights Live;' in fact I would be seen portraying various characters.

I usually have a general idea of where the story is going, but I try to avoid planning in too much detail. The best endings are those that emerge only after I've thought long and hard about the various ways the story might end. Then I choose the ending that seems surprising yet somehow inevitable.

Shellac was asked to do a recreation of our first album, but we've always been a band that improvised our sets. That's critical to the way that we function on stage. Whatever the mood takes us on stage can vary from night to night with what you feel like playing.

In essence, I feel I'm more jazz guitar player because I write vehicles geared for improvisation.

We may play in a contemporary rock vein, use standard bebop themes, and many other things besides.

No matter where I go, I never write the setlist until I'm at the venue.

Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can't pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room. You've just got to be in the moment and go with it.

It's a form of mental and verbal gymnastics, and one of the things that appeals to me most about commenting on darts is that no one knows exactly what I'm going to come out with next - and neither do I.

Comedy is a group activity, a verbal orgy.

Duct tape is like that. It's a building block. You can make a rope out of it, you can make a cloth out of it. And because it sticks to stuff it's even more powerful. It's like an uber-material because of the versatility of a sticky fiber.

I've always been a spontaneous singer. And all the stuff that you hear on the end of the songs, what they call the ad libs - that just comes out of my head. That's not thought out at all. I have the verses and the choruses, and then after that it's total improvisation.

We play a beat for 15, 20 seconds and know if we want to get on it. When we record a verse, it's no more than 15, 20 minutes. We don't have a pen and paper. We bounce off each other.

The only band I was really over-into was Cream. And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff 'cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes, come back and do a chorus and end. And I love the live jam stuff, the improvisation.

The turnaround is when you have a solo in betwixt the verses. You stoppin' to have a solo.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Winston Churchill had once told him, "An important speech should take an hour to write for every minute it took to deliver, while at the same time, dear boy, you must leave your audience convinced it was off the cuff.

Winston Churchill had once told him, "An important speech should take an hour to write for every minute it took to deliver, while at the same time, dear boy, you must leave your audience convinced it was off the cuff." That was the difference between a mere speaker and an orator, Churchill had suggested.

The sonogram didn't exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.