Quotes About Improvisation

Even though I have often recorded alone, I still feel the best music is made by musicians playing off each other.

I never learned to read or write music. Never wanted to fool with scales. That was boring, forced. The music I heard was free - flowing.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

Trying to play the new concept with a outward bound feeling.

I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere.

I kept thinking there's bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it.

What about a blues in W, in the key of W.

Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.

Same thing with harmonies. If you hear something that harmonically is interesting, express it. So that's what I'm saying about talking the music rather than just playing through.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

I'm hopeless at playing scales. Try and be instinctive first and analytic afterwords, although it's good to study the theory of music.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

When you listen to someone improvise, the notes that are played are only half the story.

It's the opportunity to play something completely different, responding to what happened just before you started to play, and I love that.

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

Before music there was silence and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.

You can't make jazz without using certain elements of Latin music.

Do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.