Kurt Elling Quotes

I like to improvise.

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

I don't practice or write stuff down - everything I do onstage was just made up before I went on.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

Composition is selective improvisation.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.

There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play.

When I start playing I'm just a rollercoaster of sound. I don't know what's coming next, I never do, and I sit and sign and talk to the people afterwards.

I love improvisation.

Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.

I didn't aim at anything except good music.

I don't write any of my material down. I like to improvise and be spontaneous.

I love playing. The keyboard is my journal.

It's always a live experience - anything that happens around you. It's so easy to just put it to a song.

To be a good improviser, you have to study composition as a parallel. Because what improvisation is, on a high level, is spontaneous composition.

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

Creating a dance is like coming up with a Chuck Berry riff.

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

I don't even start singing anything until the mic is on and recording, because my first ideas are usually my best ones. So I'll just press record; I'll freestyle a whole three minutes.

I freestyle everything.

The combination of what's written and just being in the moment is always the best way. You gotta start out with something solid and then you play.

Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising.

I love improvising.

I don't worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.