Improvisational Art Quotes

The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.

While painting I noticed a piece of madras cloth on the floor. As usual, my mind started working overtime and a pair of scissors and a small amount of glue later...I created THE COMEDIAN. Everybody loved the uniqueness of the painting. It was indeed a hit.

I love improvising.

A lot of it's experimental, spontaneous. It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors....And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making...Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation.

I'll probably never stop improvising.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Working improvisationally in my studio with dancers, it's completely different. We don't have any starting point; we don't have an end point. We don't have anything we are trying to show or do. The picture evolves from nowhere.

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.

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.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

Sometimes you write passages that don't need to be rewritten. Performance is that for me. Improvisation, things that happen in the moment, are sometimes wonderful, or wonderful as a moment to be shared between performer and people, but that's it. There might be a strong bond between you and the people, a transformative night, but as a live record it might not translate.

There are those who make music and movies in a linear way: They plan them, they have a script. Of course, you have to have a script sometimes, but that alone isn't enough.

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

I'm not a huge fan of improv theater or improv sports or whatever, because it still just looks like a tool. It looks like a technique to me.

Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.

When you're improvising, it's fun to find something that you can lean on that is similar to your life experience. In my opinion, that's very helpful.

There's no interference in stand-up. It's all the things it's hard to get in film: I get to have a wife, I get to have kids. I get to be sexual. I get to grow. I get to be a man.

Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.