Joe Satriani Quotes

I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.

Comedy is like music, and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording.

You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.

I love an actor who comes in, ready to work. It's like a good tennis player. They hit the ball where you don't expect it, and it's great.

I think the best thing you can do for an audition is to just do your work, be creative. It's OK to be spontaneous.

You can't really plan with acting!

Dancing came easy for me. Acting came hard.

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

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

I just love entertaining. I will do anything - stand-up comedy, video games, fencing, internet shorts - I just want to keep being lucky enough to entertain people anyway I can. I try never to limit my art to a medium.

As an actor, I'm always up for exploring and trying new things.

You can't plan everything - if I did a performance exactly how I rehearsed it, it would be so boring.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

The theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

I guess something people wouldn't expect me to listen to are artists like Alicia Keys. But she is so incredibly talented. She has this huge voice and great work ethic, which I really respect in an artist. She is also very humble and gracious and devoted to her skill.

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

I record cello Etudes that are fewer than four minutes long and post them on YouTube. How can one execute fully-formed ideas with utmost perfection, yet stay free enough to allow improvisatory nuance? This has immediate application in almost every area of life, but especially in performance.

I don't like going for more than a year without doing theatre. I don't mind falling flat on my face so long as I feel I'm open to the possibility of something extraordinary happening.

I'm a craftsman. I'm an actor.

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

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

I want to do more theater, which allows you to take bigger risks and experiment.

Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.