Quotes About Improvisation

Thankfully, I have a background as an actor, and you learn how to live in that world of not knowing what's going to happen next.

I think the best thing I ever did was, years before I got the 'Late Night' show, when I first got out to Los Angeles to be a television writer, the first thing I did was I signed up to take improvisational classes... And I studied that for years, and I really loved it.

The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player.

When I meet somebody in the street who knows about 'Humans of New York,' a lot of times they might have a scripted answer, and that scripted answer is the first thing to come out of their mouth.

It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.

Jazz, and the history of jazz, is the history of America.

The one thing I was really good at was being spontaneous. I was quick-witted. I lost that with my stroke.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

It was pretty radical to go from the Eagles to being the only melodic instrument. You have to play a certain way. It's like the Who. It was a great kick in the pants for me to get my chops up and to improvise a little more.

I did a lot of commercial and theater work when I got out of school and was living in Dallas, and I moved to Chicago to go through the Second City Conservatory Program.

To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

I had no training in the theater. I did not study it but just did it.

I think if my daughter was interested in acting, I would find ways for her to act in theater that has to do with her school or a kids' improvisational thing. There are ways to do it where you're not on a movie set with 60 adults, which I loved at the time, but as a parent, I don't know that I'd be dying to put her in that spot.

In the theatre, the actor is given immediate feedback.

In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

What draws me to the theatre, and what appealed to me about Too Much Light, is that you have no idea what's going to happen. That's the most exciting part of theatre, it's never the same. If it were, it would be like watching a movie.

I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical.

My mum says I never had tantrums. I had elongated and very complicated tea parties in my cot, and I was sort of talking, I guess, quite young, and I would say, 'Oh, how lovely to see you, do come in!' I'd have these theatrical tea parties by myself with my imaginary friends.

My solo playing utilizes the deployment of suggestive psychic rhythms. I'll state these throughout a given piece and play thematic improvisations on top of that. I like to suggest that rhythmic movement without always playing it. I like to create openings that I can step into.

Sometimes I practice to Allan Holdsworth or John McLaughlin, but I don't just practice to jazz and jazz-fusion albums. I'll practice to TV theme music - one of my favorites is 'M*A*S*H.' I'll just play along with anything on the TV.

It's all about theme and development anyway. That's what music is about.

If you're playing with a number of people, there are all sorts of textures, all kinds of possibilities you can get into. So why just play a theme together and then take solos?

As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.