Quotes About Improvisation

My training was that you fill in the canvas where it needs colour and polishing. You start with the words on the first night and keep adding bits of business.

Like everybody else, I love a good pop song. You know, there's nothing like it. I also just really like music that goes off on extended forays of extrapolation into different areas. So it's kind of nice to be able to move between those two poles.

It's so funny when you're actually directing because things start popping that you don't expect to pop, and something that you think is going to pop, maybe doesn't quite have the impetus that you thought it might.

When you're playing jazz, you have to somehow overcome that feeling of being intimidated because your aim is to portray that freedom in what you're playing.

John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He's the river that's carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.

Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all.

To come into my world, I've got some M&Ms and some potato chips, and I'm asking you to move furniture. We're making a movie. We're making it like we're putting on a play.

Sometimes when you start improvising on stage, which I do a fair bit of, obviously you haven't planned it. But to be honest, it's not like I'm one of these blokes who is sitting at home pouring it all out and then does a different thing on stage.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

We don't worry about continuity because when we're doing so many improvs, it's better to get the laugh. It's better to get the great lines even if they're in the wrong part of the room.

I really want to have actors contribute their own ideas, with phrasings and ideas on all levels.

The best thing that I bring in my live show is that it's not scripted. It's more of a conversation with my audience. And that's what people like about the show - it's very real. There are mistakes and laughter.

That's the way I always listened to music. I'd listen and copy it. I play by ear so that's easier than reading.

I think from doing so many live shows it gives you a real appreciation of being present. You don't know what's going to happen, you don't know what is around the corner.

I crack myself up. Even I don't know what I'm going to say next.

Yes, I've been down the pike and back. And through the years, I've heard different songs with scatting in it, and it was - always cracked me up as kind of a funny style of music, you know? When I did it, it kind of cracked me up as a comedy kind of routine.

When I'm playing comedy, it is such a crap shoot of what will work and what won't.

I like being in focus, in the moment, changing and adapting and creating and advancing a scene.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

True play is creativity.

When you're in a crisis, there's really no playbook.

If I have one criticism of the other late-night shows, it's that they're almost entirely scripted.