Quotes About Improvisation

You could say that everything the musicians have learned and known over the years, all of their technical resources, are in a dialogue with the things they are discovering every time, as if it was the first time.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

You can practice to learn a technique, but I'm more interested in conceiving of something in the moment.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

There can be no technique or formula for creativity.

I bring ideas to set, and I'm more than willing for those to be affected and be malleable based on what the other person gives me. I don't know what another actor is going to give me, on the day, and I don't want to be so hard and fast in my technique that I'm not open to what's coming.

My technique is different, and I am more spontaneous. I don't like rehearsing.

I'd rather duplicate it myself. Another of our favourite techniques.

Since being diagnosed with Asperger's, I'd been working with an acting coach who has now become a good friend. We'd been trying lots of improvisational techniques to help me with some of the problems I experience. But it's a very slow process.

Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

A couple of friends and I started a sketch comedy group when we were teenagers, just for fun and to start creating stuff. It was a blast.

I have no broadcasting training. No one's ever said to me, 'This is how you read a Teleprompter.' They just pointed to it and said, 'It's over there.'

When I started 'The Soup' back in 2004, I was so anxious because I can't really read, and I had to read teleprompter.

With 'The Soup,' obviously it has to be totally scripted out, and then, within that, I improvise punchlines and sometimes setups if I can't read the teleprompter properly.

I don't storyboard. I guess it dates back to my days in live television, where there was no possibility of storyboarding and everything was shot right on the spot - on the air, as we say - at the moment we were transmitting. I prefer to be open to what the actors do, how they interact to the given situation.

In a play, you know where you start and end and all the stops you have to do, but in television, you can't construct this carefully planned out arc for your character. You often get a script and you're shooting it two days later, and you don't know what's going to happen next. It's one of the harder things that I've done.

I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

On Ain't No Telling I came up with the bass solo.

When it comes to making a song, whatever the beat tells me to do, I do.

When I got a telly we had no aerial, but I discovered that if I or one of the children stood by it you could get a picture. So I had to make a statue that could stand by the telly.

Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.