Quotes About Improvisation

I have a rough idea when I walk into a studio though.

Nowadays, I really like playing in studios.

My husband calls it winging it - the way I just took what the studios gave me, didn't do my homework and avoided roles that would risk my image.

Many people think voice over artists just read, there's much more to it. Without acting beats, scene study and improving skills, you won't make it.

You know, if you look all my stuff... If you go back to 'Saturday Night Live,' my stuff always has music, even a bunch of my comedy stuff - like in 'Shrek,' the donkey is always singing. Music is always there.

It's easy to be silly in real life, but making stuff up onstage, that seemed hard. Better to be the funny person off-the-cuff in the room than to risk being unfunny onstage.

You know, I stumble about what I'm going to do. I don't plan. I've never had ambitions.

Sometimes just allowing yourself to noodle without any structure will enable you to stumble upon great new ideas, culminating in creating your own distinct voice on the instrument.

I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.

In 'There's Something About Mary' and 'Dumb & Dumber,' I ended up improvising quite a bit of my scenes, and later I didn't even remember what I'd said because I just winged it. When I went and saw the movie, I was as stunned as everyone else was.

It's always a stunt acting opposite Robert Picardo, because you never know what he's going to do.

A lot of improvisers mistakenly assume stand-up is awful, because there are a lot of stand-ups in the world that did not appeal to me. It was so easy to make a blanket statement when I was improvising only: 'Stand-up's terrible.' It's so ignorant and stupid to do that. But it's easy to do that. So that's where I came from.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I have been training under Melvin Louis and Dimple Kotecha. They're very different people and their styles and training procedures are also different. Melvin is more into the improvised version, he mixes hip-hop, street style, Bollywood etc. He is more into the madness and gives me the freedom to try my own thing.

Sometimes, we have to turn our camera to a mirror to shoot something, and people think, 'Oh, that's very stylish.' Yes it is, but at the same time, we did it because we are shooting in a very small space, and that was our only option.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

I never have fixed subjects that I discuss on stage. I never go on with any particular subjects in mind.

There is no substitute for jamming and getting to know each other on the road.

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

Modern jazz: Variations on a non-existent theme

By the time they had arrived at Danny's house, neither of them had come up with a plan. Danny had suggested hoping for a snow day. Wendell had pointed out that it was mid-April. Wendell had then suggested that Danny go to the library and actually read about oceans. This idea was met with the contempt it deserved.

The beauty of the band was you never knew what was going to come out next.

As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty.