Steve Forbert Quotes

I just have fun on stage. There's nothing premolded out there. I try to always do something different.

The musicians in the band, and myself as a performer, love the risks of the unpredictable and the feeling of jumping off cliffs musically.

That's why I love improvisational theater so much - you do it [scene] once and then it's done. You don't get bogged down with a lot of preplanning and repetition. If I do something and it gets a laugh, I don't want to do it again. Why bother? I'm just repeating myself. It's boring.

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

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

When I play a solo I'm just expressing that moment. It can go horribly wrong easily enough.

I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

With 'Friday Night Lights,' we were encouraged to make it our own and improvise as much as we wanted.

It's always fun to improvise.

The rule is to try and never play the same thing twice when you have the freedom to do that in the song.

We didn't say, 'Hey, we're gonna pick a bunch of cover songs,' or, 'We're gonna write an original song that has to sound like this, because we're a metal band, so we're gonna cover some metal songs.' We did the opposite. We just said, 'We're gonna have fun with these songs, and we're gonna try different things.'

What makes jazz different is that you can't predict it, it's all about freedom. Just when you think you know what you're going to hear there'll be a left turn, a jazz musician will change it up.

I like to improvise so much live because I get bored playing the same thing over again. It's like the kid at school that already knows all the answers so doodles all over the paper. I do that a lot live.

You want a solo to be structured, a song within a song, but you want it to sound like it's the first time you're playing it, too.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

Spontaneity is such an entertaining facet of show business.

I don't always have to be on what is the newest in music is. I'm slowly educating myself in music. For me, I feel more free in not knowing everything in what I'm doing. You can start making up too many rules for yourself. It should just be love and fun and feeling good.

I'd rather play here in this small bar and just do a good show. Because it's fun and there's no expectations, it's encouragement to be different, do something new.

Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.

I don't do the same show on any two nights.

I think a show is for fun, and the thing about playing live is that you make mistakes, and that's what's sort of exciting about it.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

We really never know what we're gonna play when we get on stage.

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

Music is the only thing I've ever known that doesn't have any rules at all.