Jason Moran Quotes

You know what the material is so that you never play it the same way twice.

In the performance sense, I find that interpretation is improvisatory in nature. You can go anywhere with an interpretation on any given day.

A lot of improvisation and freedom went into 'Pinata.'

When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.

I like to improvise.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

I ad lib. I've gotta bring my own into it.

My act is sort of improvisational. I have a skeleton in my head, but no fat or skin on it.

With 'Friday Night Lights,' we were encouraged to make it our own and improvise as much as we wanted.

I improvise a lot and try something new every couple of years.

I personally don't lock in a performance, because I do leave room for things to happen, so I just make sure I'm very intimate with what I'm saying and why I'm saying it so that no matter what happens, we can do whatever we want to do and leave space for play.

So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things.

I never work out my leads. Everything I do is usually totally spontaneous. If someone says, 'That was good; play that again,' I'm not able to do it.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.

What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory.

I'm not able to go in with an act that I use month to month year to year all the time. It's constantly evolving and changing and that keeps me on my toes but certainly adds to the challenge.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

I've never had a plan - it was just to try and get with the people you like to play with, and try to do the best you can.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

This is the rock 'n' roll life, and you had to invent it as you went along. There was no textbook to say how you operate this machinery.

I like to work spontaneously.

I love to improvise when it's appropriate and encouraged by a producer.

There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is.