Vir Das Quotes

I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.

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 only like doing live telly. It's great because you go in and do it and then go home. No edit, no retakes.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

I'm a singer and performer in a hybrid show that's standup, music and audience participation.

I've been a live performer longer than I've been a television performer. For me, live is where it's at.

The show is different every night, because I never write a setlist.

Live music is better.

When the band would leave the stage, and then the audience would just take over, and keep the groove goin'.

A CCR Headcleaner show will blow your mind.

More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don't happen in the studio.

I do an improv show on Sunday where we have a class, and then afterwards we go and do a live performance in front of an audience.

Theatre is more exciting in the sense that you can actually see the audience in the eye. You know there are no takes and retakes. You have one chance to do your job... and you better do it well!

Inside was the second LP album of a comedian's performance before an audience.

I always give the encore over to chaos, so people can yell out requests and I can hack my way through a song that I don't really know anymore.

As improvisers, we're acting as composers in front of people.

If any of you on your journeys see her-shout to me, whistle...he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere he could hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as if he were no longer on stage.

Every show with my Jazzmaster is like a new show.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.

When we perform music at TV shows, we always try to do something that's not scripted because anything that's a surprise for the audience and the crew and the other performers, it works better on camera and for the people back home, too.

In a live setting, the audience is trapped and can't leave. That really makes the audience be with you and laugh more because you're there.

There's something strange about comedy requests. I guess if you enjoy something, why not hear it again? But there's something weird about it being live, when the person is there, and asking them, "Hey, do this thing like you did it, but make it seem like you're making it up on the spot.".

Life is improvisation. All of those [improv] classes were like church to me. The training had seeped into me and changed who I am.

That's what it is-it's jazz. It's just jazz. That's what the whole thing is about to me. It's about what's happening right now in this context. This conversation is jazz to a certain extent. It's improvisation. What appeals to me about music is the improvization. That's what I don't like about the media-they're not living it.

I always do that at the end of shows, like a Q&A session. First of all it lets people know that this isn't some preprogrammed, press-play show where I have to say the exact same words in the exact same order. That's part of the thing with live comedy is that people like the fun aspect of it and I enjoy the taking questions part.