Quotes About Improvisation

I feel there has to be a certain amount of improvisation as I'm writing, which means any idea or any commitment to a project is risky. It involves time; it involves gathering of material, and sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes it does. As I'm starting out on a project, I can't tell if it will click or not.

Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition.

I worked the drive-through at McDonald's and tried out different accents - Italian, Russian, Irish.

We would play, then they would play a set, then we would jam on the last song.

I always felt as a horn player, a jam session wasn't satisfying enough for me. I should have been a rhythm section player, actually.

With the jam bands I've seen, it's about music, and it's about theory, and it's about making everyone feel better with music.

The best way for me to teach myself an instrument is to just jam on it, and sound awful sometimes, and sound great other times.

'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.

One of the things I like to do is to try to jam with everybody.

I can't try to write a song - songs come out of me. I have to play the guitar and if I jam a song, boom! That's a song.

If I plan to write, I won't be able to write anything good. I just need to kind of jam and let things come.

Before we really started writing our own songs in the James Gang, we'd play covers, and then, in the middle of them, we'd go for a jam for four or five minutes. At some point, we had six or seven of those sections, and we didn't need to cover other people's songs anymore.

I was known around the college for jamming in the lounge.

To me, a sure-fire way to get in a rut is by sitting around playing by yourself for too long. You've gotta get out there and jam, man! You don't have to necessarily be in a band, all you've gotta have are a couple of buds who play too. They don't have to be guitarists either; jamming with a bassist or a drummer is cool.

Sometimes you do complete run-throughs of scenes, sometimes you break scenes down into little bits. It just depends on what the actors like to do. It's almost like jamming.

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.

It's like jazz: You learn the rules to break them - as long as you can break them in a meaningful way.

Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.

There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming.

Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

My music is jazz.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

It's always fun to talk about jazz.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.