Joey Alexander Quotes

In the performance sense, I find that interpretation is improvisatory in nature. You can go anywhere with an interpretation on any given day.

My technique is different, and I am more spontaneous. I don't like rehearsing.

Like Russell, I enjoy the fact that when I'm playing solo, if I want to do something completely spontaneous, I don't have to worry about how I'm going to cue the other musicians, or if it's something that's rehearsed.

Sometimes on my show, I just play something out of the blue, and the band picks up on it.

I don't worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I'm contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don't come in with lyrics... I just go in and let it happen.

I've never been good at improvising.

Screen is satisfying because it's so technical and mysterious. It's like playing roulette: you get a script, you think it's either great or naff, but you have no idea how it will really turn out. On stage, you are your own editor - and you get brief moments of grace, where suddenly you feel free.

A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.

I used to love going and playing jam sessions, doing things spontaneously. I can't do that anymore. Everything you do is documented, nothing is casual anymore.

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.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

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

I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it.

I don't like planning what am I gonna say to the crowd. Sometimes the show takes a whole different twist.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

I just do my thing onstage - it's just what happens. No one, even if they're into the band, can know it's as natural and real as anything can be. I don't think about it.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

I've found in the past that if we planned the show a night before, once we slept and woke up, we weren't in that mood anymore. Because I really think doing a live show means you should be exploring your live feelings, and planning is not good.

I just go with the flow, so any style can be in my music - that makes it exciting.

Hopefully I'm bringing to rock n' roll the kind of spontaneity that I love, and always believed rock and roll stands for.

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.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

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