Leon Redbone Quotes

My genre of music is very eclectic. I might play some Latin jazz, or just go into a spontaneous jazz thing. That's the thing about coming to one of my performances. Not every show is the same.

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.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

I've never guided my life. I've just been whipped along by the waves I'm sitting in. I don't make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

I can never predict what's going to happen.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

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

No, I don't have a plan. Whatever happens happens. There's never a plan.

Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

If somebody says, "Oh, we're going to improvise!," I'm like, Oh, get me out of here.

Play is experimenting with chance.

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.

You never know what's going to happen. Anything can happen there... and often does.

I write [music] as a sow piddles.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.