Improvised Music Quotes

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

All of the best songs happen on a whim.

Touring with King Crimson wasn't a lot of fun for me. I had a lot of equipment, and when I was in improvised music I'd set it up myself, play the gig, and put it all away again.

The piano song that I do in the movie [The Hangover], it's a great example, that was never - that wasn't in the script.

The reality for me is simple. When music is written, it is usually categorized as classical. When it is improvised, it can still be called classical if it is an inspired improvisation. In either category, it is still music, and it can be good or bad or simply mediocre.

I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.

Diversity is its most consistent characteristic....The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

They just said, 'Roll the tape.' No rehearsal or nothing... Muddy [Waters] didn't come in and say 'I wanna rehearse.' He used to look at me and say 'Let's just play the blues. That's all you need to do.

I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.

Do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.

People call what we do "stretch music." This is our style, and one of the newer, in vogue ways of playing creative, improvised music. It really grew out of me trying to address something that I saw in my everyday life in my neighborhood - trying to develop that and refine that and excavate exactly what that was in a way that, when I communicated it, it was palpable and easily read. That started really early. Why it started was from something that I was really angry about.

I loved the freedom of improvised music.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.

When I wrote 'Grand Illusion,' I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.

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.

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts; the very undertow of our life's stream.

When they say 'jazz,' I'm thinking of a word called 'the creative process.' It intersects every vein and tributary, avenue, path, that everyone's living. It crosses through there, but it's been contained.