Jazz Improvisation Quotes

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change. ~ Warren G. Bennis

If you go back to the roots of jazz, it was all about COLLECTIVE improvisation. ~ Henry Threadgill

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts. ~ Ken Burns

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play. ~ Ahmad Jamal

Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower, that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation. ~ Ellis Marsalis, Jr.

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. ~ Brian McKnight

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality. ~ Mose Allison

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity, among American Negroes, was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For, in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has
the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody
needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone towards all these. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key. ~ Harold Land

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself. ~ Cecil Taylor

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

Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head. ~ Andy Cohen

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry
if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again. ~ Jonah Lehrer

I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she'd start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to "make believe" ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock. My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote "Misty", Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well. ~ Richie Havens

Maybe being a good parent is about improvisation and spontaneity. Maybe it's about genuinely being with your kid. Sometimes though, it is also about being able to catch sick in yours hands. ~ Keith Stuart

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it. ~ Thelonious Monk

Into the ash I dripped my pen and came out with fire. ~ Jazz Feylynn

I feel there has to be a certain amount of improvisation as I'm writing, which means any idea or any commitment to a project is risky. It involves time; it involves gathering of material, and sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes it does. As I'm starting out on a project, I can't tell if it will click or not. ~ Joanna Scott

Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful. ~ Jesse Stone

The worst crime is faking it ~ Kurt Cobain

Sweets [Edison] can say more with one note than any other Jazz player alive ... an approach that stresses simplicity, glorious tone, natural potency and an unmatched affinity. He is a unique stylist in our music. ~ Oscar Peterson

Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me. ~ Rachel Bloom

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on. ~ Gerry Mulligan

I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space. ~ Donald Miller

Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme. ~ Richard Holbrooke

When I began doing theatre in high school I saw that I could get laughs from people but I didn't really connect that to going on and becoming a comedian. I was interested in acting and while I was at Boston College I was part of an improv group, Mother's Fleabag, which had a long history and has been known as one of the best college improvisation groups in the U.S. ~ Amy Poehler

The French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz - it's just a national gift. ~ Alice B. Toklas

I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags. ~ Haruki Murakami

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it. ~ Norman Granz

The score must govern the music. It must have authority, and not merely be an arbitrary jumping-off point for improvisation. ~ Cornelius Cardew

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

No one really knows why people are born transgender, but there are a few medical theories. The most talked-about one is that a hormonal imbalance during pregnancy might cause it. Some doctors believe it might be a brain structure thing. It's even possible that it's genetic. No one knows for sure, but whatever the reason, it's real and no one's fault. ~ Jazz Jennings

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own. ~ Studs Terkel

As I've said before, "the Mod generation", contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don't care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so - from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz. ~ Ruadhan J. McElroy

Acting is really scary, but it's also challenging, fun, hard work. There's always an element of improvisation with every actor, even when something is really scripted. ~ Michael Pitt

If they think they are doing something new, they ought to do what I do every day - spend at least two hours every day listening to Johann Sebastian Bach and, man, it's all there. If they want to improvise around a theme,which is the essence of jazz, they should learn from the master. He never wastes a note, and he knows where every note is going and when to bring it back. Some of these cats go way out and forget where they began or what they started to do. Bach will clear it up for them. ~ Coleman Hawkins

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me ~ Donald Miller

I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener. ~ Peggy Lee

They went along a balcony that looked down over the dining room and the dance floor. The lisp of hot jazz came up to them from the lithe, swaying bodies of a high-yaller band. With the lisp of jazz came the smell of food and cigarette smoke and perspiration. The balcony was high and the scene down below had a patterned look, like an overhead camera shot. (Nevada Gas) ~ Raymond Chandler

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature. ~ David Brin

If anybody is a master at improvisation, it would be Ken Jeong. He is hilarious. ~ Anneliese Van Der Pol

The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian
heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions ~ Frank O'Hara

I thought I was actually doing quite well - I was on Jazz FM six days a week. I fancied going to Australia and I had a wonderful experience. It's changed me for the better and it was flattering to win. ~ Tony Blackburn

There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created. ~ Gerald Early

All I have to do is wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, Jazz. Everything else is optional. ~ Barry Lyga