Quotes About Improvisation

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage.

I can make a virtue of slapdash. Slapdash can give you courage.

It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.

Sha la la, man...

Jazz is what I play for a living.

You ever wear a bathing suit because you've run out of clean underwear?

Jazz is my childhood.

Florence had made a tent of her bedding and was under it with a flashlight, reading The Little Prince.

I always try to leave room for improvisation and responsive musicianship. That's what makes the music feel alive every night and makes playing fun every time. You're not just doing the same thing you performed the night before, even if it's the same song.

A composition can include an element of improvisation as one of its layers. But jazz improvisation is based on specific codes, which don't allow the possibility to construct multiple layers, to put together different words, to have different rhetorical gestures intact.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

Design is the best way to get from A to B when you don't yet know what B is.

Creativity stands at the center of all education.

When you go live, anything can happen. It excites me because it means I have to be on. When the camera's on, whatever happens happens.

Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

I started off doing live TV, so I kind of learnt that if I get myself into trouble, I get myself out of it.

The lesson I take from TV is the less rehearsed it is, the more natural it's going to seem. Don't overthink it. It seems to work enough for me, and I'll just keep doing it.

I don't want to say the same lines every night.

Reciting lines is hard; making stuff up is much, much easier.

Live stage is being made as you go along. You feel the energy. There's nothing like a live audience.

You have to be on your game with a live audience because anything can change.