Quotes About Improvisation

I try to be prepared for the moment, through understanding, and being warmed up, knowing all about chords and scales, so I don't even have to think and I can get right to what it is I want to say.

You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.

The main thing on film is you want to be innocent to the moment.

the Chilean psychiatrist and brilliant thinker Claudio Naranjo, said about music, "Only repetition invites spontaneous innovation," and of course this is true of all the arts. You

Yes, and I'm sure the arena will be full of bags of flour for me to chuck at people.

Then make one," says Gale. "Even a weak bow is better than no bow at all.

I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.

I learned to glitter the pumpkins for Halloween not because I went into it thinking, 'I'm going to glitter some pumpkins!' No. I bought all of these big, cold, slimy, disgusting pumpkins and tried to carve them, and it was gross, so I had to find something else to do with them. Glitter was life-changing.

That's the thing about musicians: The priority is to create something new that's never been before. And you put your life on the line every time that you play.

Even if you've being playing together for years, there'll always be something new. You're constantly back phrasing, front phrasing, singing faster, singing slower.

I love to create something new every night onstage; that makes a big difference.

I would like to have a movie under my own control sometime, and see what could be done with it. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood will make an improvisational movie someday.

Happy accidents are real gifts, and they can open the door to a future that didn't even exist. It's kind of nice sometimes to set up something to encourage or allow happy accidents to happen.

When we played with the Rollins Band, we'd keep songs going until we felt like ending it.

I generally, you know, I don't - I don't really scat. I'm - I'm basically a songwriter so you need a little lyrics that rhyme and stuff.

With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.

My idea is to take the improvisational excitement that takes place with Carnatic music and juxtapose that in different sonic contexts.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.

While you're improvising, you may come up with something which will break him up. As soon as that smile comes out, you know that, hey, we're having fun.

There's such a freewheeling nature to 'Second City,' and the greatest thing about 'Second City' was having a sophisticated audience night after night who appreciated what it was. They knew it wasn't all going to be great when you improvised, so they were very forgiving that way.

I love doing 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' on Radio 4. It's my favourite thing to do because it's just daft: it's not about the news. It's not about anything.

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.