Improvising Quotes

Every day, you have to make three hours of music, just randomly improvising, and that's a great way to weed stuff out. ~ Caroline Shaw

..:Sometimes when cooking, I haven't had all the ingredients required to fulfill the recipe which I might be working on at the time. But one thing I have learned is that, without them, we can learn to improvise. And most of the time, by improvising, some chefs have created the greatest plates ever. Regardless what you might be going through right now in your life, learn to improvise and make the best with what you now have. Add your own taste and style to all you do. Follow the recipes if you can, but do be original. Put your own signature to things:.. ~ Rafael Garcia

First of all, you're improvising through a puppet, so you're not always yourself: you're a cow or you're a pig or you're an old woman, you know, whatever puppet you pick, or you're a demon, you know, whatever you pick up, that's what you get to be in the scene. ~ Brian Henson

The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire ~ Don Winslow

I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music. ~ Hamid Drake

As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane. ~ Herbie Mann

A lot of lines in movies were written, but I'm always improvising. Once you get into the scene, it just comes to me. ~ Chris Tucker

As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender business. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch

If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process. ~ Giovanni Ribisi

These actors like Danny McBride and Jonah Hill are so good at improvising, and when they do it, it's this fun moment for the audience. It makes them feel like they're watching something fresh and new. ~ Jillian Bell

No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale. ~ Honore De Balzac

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Nooooooooooo!" Screaming the word, Amy and Dan moved as one.
Time slowed down, which, Dan knew from experience, often happened when you were in midair. By the time they leaped onto the hood of Fiske's car (oops, dents), and Dan had ripped off a windshield wiper to use as a weapon (probably not the best idea, but hey, he was improvising), Scarey Harley Dude had turned around.
He strode off in his motorcycle boots, moving swiftly to his bike without seeming to hurry. His helmet back on, sunglasses adjusted, he roared off straight into the road, weaving through the thick traffic like smoke.
Amy's face was squashed against the windshield. Dan held the wiper aloft like a club.
And Evan Tolliver stood on the sidewalk, blinking at them.
Dan waved the windshield wiper at him. "Hey, bro. We didn't want to miss our ride. ~ Jude Watson

The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work. ~ Stephen Colbert

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. ~ Twyla Tharp

I came up with a 'forecasting cell,' which is basically a mixed intention cell or chord that is a complete hybrid of a consonance and a dissonance, and what that does when you are improvising is lead you to where you are supposed to go. ~ Christian Scott

Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising. ~ Christopher Walken

I love being onstage. I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising. ~ Stephen Colbert

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front. ~ Keith Emerson

Improvising political dialogue is not easy. ~ James Nesbitt

There's something very edgy about Bill Murray out there improvising. ~ Harold Ramis

I enjoy the challenge of taking something which was not meant for the piano, distilling its essence and writing or improvising it for/at the piano, but having the listener forget that he or she is listening to a piano. ~ Michael Hersch

The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you're improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we're improvising and I say, 'Freeze, I have a gun,' and you say, 'That's not a gun. It's your finger. You're pointing your finger at me,' our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, 'Freeze, I have a gun!' and you say, 'The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!' then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun. ~ Tina Fey

Life is perphas after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is perculiar and inexplicable. We are constanly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change-sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once- and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment. ~ Anne Giardini

In many ways, I think it's easier in some ways, or it's more entertaining or more guaranteed to be entertaining than traditional improvising. Again, because you're not just you in your body. ~ Brian Henson

I smile back at her. "I must be stronger than I look." "All women are," my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges. Clint ~ Hope Jahren

Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music. ~ Stephen Bruner

Improvisation is about finding the best joke or the silliest way to get something across. Improvising conflict is always fun because you can just go for it. ~ Ed Helms

In 'There's Something About Mary' and 'Dumb & Dumber,' I ended up improvising quite a bit of my scenes, and later I didn't even remember what I'd said because I just winged it. When I went and saw the movie, I was as stunned as everyone else was. ~ Harland Williams

I love improvising. ~ Lasse Hallstrom

The Chili Peppers do a lot of improvising, but it's within the framework of song structures. The Meatbats is from a purely instrumental standpoint. But when you hear the term 'instrumental music' you think it's real serious stuff and everybody's playing a million notes and it's about playing fast. That's not what we do. ~ Chad Smith

When I do the roles, when I'm in the room and auditioning, I'll ask the director if they're cool with me adding stuff, or just improvising while we're doing it. And I would say, like, 90 percent of the time, they say, 'Absolutely.' ~ Ben Schwartz

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

Boxing is a lot of preparation and then improvising, so there are parallels to being an actor. ~ Seth Numrich

If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn't worried that I wasn't improvising. ~ Alexis Korner

Ah, you coward! Look at you, running." "Actually, it's called improvising. ~ Jonathan Stroud

I'm trying to be expressive on my instrument and conduct as I'm improvising. So I'm conducting with the melodies and the rhythms that I play. And so it's a very organic way. It's a lot like Charles Mingus played, cuing people in from what you play and how you play it rather than standing in front of a band, conducting and pointing. ~ Joe Lovano

I know there are some actors who are just brilliant at improvising and brilliant at just being in the moment and doing it there and then. I'm not one of those actors. ~ Ioan Gruffudd

I am improvising a brassiere," I said with dignity. "I don't mean to ride sidesaddle through the mountains wearing a dress, and if I'm not wearing stays, I don't mean my breasts to be joggling all the way, either. Most uncomfortable, joggling." "I daresay." He edged into the room and circled me at a cautious distance, eyeing my nether limbs with interest. "And what are those?" "Like them?" I put my hands on my hips, modeling the drawstring leather trousers that Phaedre had constructed for me - laughing hysterically as she did so - from soft buckskin provided by one of Myers's friends in Cross Creek. "No," he said bluntly. "Ye canna be going about in - in - " He waved at them, speechless. "Trousers," I said. "And of course I can. I wore trousers all the time, back in Boston. They're very practical." He ~ Diana Gabaldon

My school life was very much a wandering experience. I was having trouble in school and I was not making a lot of friends. So coming home and actually improvising on the piano and just coming up with melodies was an escape for me. ~ Josh Groban

Yeah, improvising only really works 100% when you're with somebody. ~ Bill Hader

I do a little improv in my shows. Kind of like our movie, I'll do beats and ideas of dialogue, but I think there's less pressure because it's a live show. If you mess up, the audience laughs because we don't really know what we're doing. But as far as shooting, that was very scary, trying to make a point and drive the film. It definitely helped improvising. ~ Charlyne Yi

I'm an improviser at heart, when I'm writing, I'm improvising in my head. When you're an improviser on stage, you can never be precious about anything, you can't control what anyone else is going to do. The best stuff comes out of moments of inspiration that spontaneously happen. ~ Scot Armstrong

Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising. ~ Billy Crystal

While you're improvising, you may come up with something which will break him up. As soon as that smile comes out, you know that, hey, we're having fun. ~ Shelley Berman

I write and rewrite and memorize, and then inject my performance with improvising and spontaneity, because if something feels too rehearsed, it's not going to be fun. ~ Andy Daly

Grown up at last and required to live all day long in the real world, it now seemed to Beatrix that imaginary fairies were of a great deal more use than real ones. And I think we must agree with her on that score. It is undeniably true that the imagination is far more powerful than knowledge, and that it is much more important to believe in something than to know it! There is, after all, a limit to the things we can know (even if we are fortunate enough to be geniuses), but no limit whatsoever to the things we might imagine. And if we cannot imagine, we will never know what we have yet to learn, for imagination shows us what is possible before knowledge leads us to what is true. For Beatrix, dreaming, imagining, creating, improvising, and fancying redeemed the stern and sometimes frightening world in which she lived, and allowed her to transform it. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

If you're too hung up on improvising 'correctly', you will almost always fail. ~ Craig Cackowski

When I worked with Robin Williams, now there is improv! He is just as funny as you think he is. We did at least five or six takes of every scene, improvising every scene differently. He was a riot. ~ Stephen Root

I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense. ~ Alan Arkin

There are certain actors who are very good at improvising, like Dustin Hoffman and Glenda Jackson. ~ John Schlesinger

Although arguably, it's my job to dig deep whether I'm improvising or not. It's just their style. That's the way they feel like they get what they want. I mean, they're really good storytellers, so I love being in their hands. ~ Amanda Peet

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going. ~ John Darnielle

A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing. ~ Sally Schneider

I don't mind doing scripted material. It's actually kind of a relief, because improvising is a little bit like screenwriting on your feet. ~ John C. Reilly

When we were making Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light, we were jamming. From that we were taking the best bits and then recording and improvising on top of those. ~ Tina Weymouth

The concept of clearing one's mind before performing a task so that it is consumed by nothing but that task, yet is open at the same time to anything that might happen - that concept can be applied to playing guitar, and it's enormously helpful for improvising. ~ Kirk Hammett

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising. ~ Barbara Januszkiewicz

Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answered, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure! ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Everybody improvises without noticing it. Life is about improvising. You can't control what happens in your life, I mean, you don't know what can happen in your life today. So you somehow improvise. ~ Hiromi

I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just that you're standing up. ~ Bill Nighy

I wouldn't want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm. ~ Robert Englund

Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style. ~ Gunther Schuller

Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer. ~ Kurt Ralske

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country - death, war, guns, illness - our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight-point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It's improv. Which is funny, because aren't we just improvising all day long? Isn't our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of? ~ Lily King

I haven't written a novel or something that long, because I really am improvising all along and the story is growing new limbs to do what it needs to do. So there's very little planning. There's a little planning where I say, "Well, it looks like I'm going in this direction, ok, good." But there's very little forethought or intellectual justification: "Oh, look, I'm putting in a theme park because that represents dystopian America!" ~ George Saunders

You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know. ~ Mike Leigh

Writing is improvising sitting down. K.B.Brege ~ K.B. Brege

If you're onstage and you're improvising and nothing's happening, people are racing for the door. But the director can go shopping later and pick up pieces and moments and insert them. ~ Gary Cole

In one scene, when I was supposed to say, "In a pig's eye you are," what came out was, "In a pig's ass you are." Old habits die awfully hard. ~ Ava Gardner

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. ~ Ben Fountain

I think initially it's terrifying because going into a show where, you know, "Oh, I'm going to be on stage for two hours, I have no lines to memorize, I have nothing really prepared," and actually I say that, the show is not all improvising. ~ Brian Henson

The show is probably 60 percent improvising and 40 percent not. So there's quite a bit of it that we do have prepared and that part of it, you have memorized and you've rehearsed and you're prepared, just like any show. ~ Brian Henson

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies. ~ Laura Mvula

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions. ~ Terry Riley

My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music. ~ John Zorn

When I did The X-Files, there was certainly less of that because the script was as it was and it was such a wonderful script and it was quite complex and there wasn't a hell of a lot of improvising I could do to bring to the table, but I guess what I did bring was a sense of self and that the reason I was cast was because I did come across as someone who possibly was only human for a short time. ~ Rhys Darby

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got 'The Devil Wears Prada,' and it's why I even got in the door for 'Mad Men.' ~ Rich Sommer

Shamanic healing is a journey. It involves stepping out of our habitual roles, our conventional scripts, and improvising a dancing path. ~ Gabrielle Roth

A lot of improvisers mistakenly assume stand-up is awful, because there are a lot of stand-ups in the world that did not appeal to me. It was so easy to make a blanket statement when I was improvising only: 'Stand-up's terrible.' It's so ignorant and stupid to do that. But it's easy to do that. So that's where I came from. ~ Kurt Braunohler

I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess. ~ Violante Placido

My favorite dish is cleaning out the fridge on Sunday night and improvising a great medley. ~ Matthew McConaughey

Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.
Astronauts have these qualities not because we're smarter than everyone else (though let's face it, you do need a certain amount of intellectual horsepower to be able to fix a toilet). It's because we are taught to view the world - and ourselves - differently. My shorthand for it is "thinking like an astronaut." But you don't have to go to space to learn to do that.
It's mostly a matter of changing your perspective. ~ Chris Hadfield

On one hand the Christian missionaries sought to convert the heathen, by fire and sword if need be, to the gospel of peace, brotherhood, and heavenly beatitude; on the other, the more venturesome spirits wished to throw off the constraining traditions and customs, and begin life afresh, levelling distinctions of class, eliminating superfluities and luxuries, privileges and distinctions, and hierarchical rank. In short, to go back to the Stone Ages, before the institutions of Bronze Age civilization had crystallized. Though the Western hemisphere was indeed inhabited, and many parts of it were artfully cultivated, so much of it was so sparsely occupied that the European thought of it as a virgin continent against whose wildness he pitted his manly strength. In one mood the European invaders preached the Christian gospel to the native idolaters, subverted them with strong liquors, forced them to cover their nakedness with clothes, and worked them to an early death in mines; in another, the pioneer himself took on the ways of the North American Indian, adopted his leather costume, and reverted to the ancient paleolithic economy: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish and berries, revelling in the wilderness and its solitude, defying orthodox law and order, and yet, under pressure, improvising brutal substitutes. The beauty of that free life still haunted Audubon in his old age. ~ Lewis Mumford

My younger brother and I have been writing together, mainly for fun, for years, but we've been improvising together since we were kids. Literally. ~ Ty Burrell

They are pretty good at improvising, but God help us if they are given time to think. Dean Atchison ~ Robert Dallek

In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called "meddah. " They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, impersonating that character. Everybody could go and listen, you know ordinary people, even the sultan, Muslims and non-Muslims. Stories cut across all boundaries. Like "The Tales of Nasreddin Hodja," which were very popular throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and Asia. Today, stories continue to transcend borders ~ Elif Shafak

At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it surprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he's going to do it, he catches her. ~ Sally Rooney

I think when people talk about improvising it turns into this silly thing like, "Oh there's like a hula hoop there and I'm like 'Oh what's going on here? Is this a really big ring?'" ~ Aziz Ansari

When Indian musicians play a raga it's very restrictive. But, in a way these restraints are essential to liberate yourself through them, if that makes sense. I'm very much of this school of rhythm, it's the direction I'm drawn in when I'm writing and improvising. ~ John McLaughlin

[The Great Gatsby] is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby's rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had 'a careful and brilliant finish. ... There is evidence in every line of hard work and intelligent effort. ... The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.' ... Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.
Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat's meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls 'that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book ... and a finished product' - in other words, editing. ~ Susan Bell

In my case, I am improvising with existing sound files. I use an MSP patch that a friend of mine made, and you have to improvise when you use this patch. I don't use a guitar in performance anymore. ~ Christian Fennesz

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape. ~ Gary Burton

From the earliest days of man there has endured the conviction that there is an order of existence which is entirely strange to him. It does indeed seem that the strict order of the visible world is only a semblance, one providing certain gross materials which become the basis for subtle improvisations of invisible powers. Hence, it may appear to some that a leafless tree is not a tree but a signpost to another realm; that an old house is not a house but a thing possessing a will of its own; that the dead may throw off that heavy blanket of earth to walk in their sleep, and in ours. And these are merely a few of the infinite variations on the themes of the natural order as it is usually conceived.

But is there really a strange world? Of course. Are there, then, two worlds? Not at all. There is only our own world and it alone is alien to us, intrinsically so by virtue of its lack of mysteries. If only it actually were deranged by invisible powers, if only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us, and less like an empty room filled with the echoes of this dreadful improvising. To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited to our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange! ~ Thomas Ligotti

Victor said, 'I'm going to take this axe and I'm going to hack off one of your hands. The blade is dull and I couldn't find a whetstone so it might take a couple of blows to do the job, so you'll need to be patient. The pain and the fear will be like nothing you've ever experienced, but the horror of watching the stump where your wrist used to be spray blood everywhere is going to be like nothing you can even imagine. At that point you won't be worried by what your employers might do to you. You'll bleed to death in about two minutes. Which is why I'm telling you now: don't forget the stove. When I sever your hand, you're going to be free of that post. It's only 20 feet to that stove, but it's going to feel like a mile. Focus on it now, because you're going to be in shock. When you cauterise the wound against the cast iron, you're probably going to pass out, but I'll wake you up again. If your heart stops, I'll use the epinephrine you brought to bring you back. If you don't talk to me then, if you don't give what I want to know about your employers, I'll take your other hand. After that, I'll start improvising. Are you ready?' Niven's gaze flicked between the axe and Victor's eyes. 'You… you can't be serious.' Victor raised the axe. ~ Tom Wood

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. ~ Mark Duplass

I think that if you're improvising on TV, it's a great way to help the dialogue between actors and writers. ~ Zach Woods

The Byzantines are logical and organized. They operate like a machine, like a catapult, for example. Everything works well when all steps take place as they should. But they are trained to follow rules, not to think for themselves. We, on the other hand, are good at improvising but lack control, we are, to a great extent, undisciplined, but have unity of Cause. ~ John Elray

I think everybody came into it with the understanding that they would go through an experience that is literally not by the book, that is not executing the script and then going home, but living and breathing these characters and being in the moment with each other, and improvising and creating a lot of present-tense intensity between characters. ~ Oren Moverman

I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats. ~ Paul Bley