Iris Apfel Quotes

I love improvisation.

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.

Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.

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

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 worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.

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

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.

This band makes sure that we have whole sections of stuff that are free form so that they don't know what we are doing next, that is the fun part of playing. You are playing something that you haven't ever played before.

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

So I figured in keeping with the record, I'd do something off the wall which is show up for free and wing it... I don't know, I'm just going to play some songs. I think it'll be fun.

I love when things can repeat and you can make things slightly different each time and just react to the music and react to the recording.

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.

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

You think it's all written, but it's not. There's always another way to twist those three chords around.

You play ensemble things that you had no idea you were going to play two minutes before.

If you ever go to a music session, you'll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they're reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

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.

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'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

I love improvisation. It's quite exciting.

We go in and I do my thing, and then we supplement it with whatever we want.

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

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

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.