Improvisation Skill Quotes

I learned a lot about lead; you don't have to blow your cookies in the first bar. It is much harder to be simple that to be complicated during solos.

I don't feel that rap has been respected as an art form. Because people have seen rappers rap off the top of their heads, they don't think it is difficult.

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

Your solos should be as interesting as any other part of the song.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

I'm not the comic innovator that Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy are. I can't just come out with an incredible line.

I think when I feel I'm at my best is when I'm on stage, and it's my version of jazz because it's just riffing or something.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

When I feel like improvising, I always improvise on the guitar, never on the lute. It's as natural to me as breathing.

If you are a New York comedian who knows how to improvise and has glasses, you're going to start getting commercials.

Writing and producing the show is an intellectual process. Performing the show is far more athletic and intuitive, because you don't get to do it twice. It helps if you've done whatever the old saw is, 10,000 hours of it. Because I've done 10,000 hours of comedy, I have this database in my mind of what works and what doesn't work.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this - or more accurately, because of this - his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz - at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.

If you do live shows long enough as a comedian, you can still hear that rhythm of laughing. It's ingrained in you, and it's not something you can really teach somebody. It comes from doing hours and hours and hours and years and decades on stage, performing in front of live crowds.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

If you give me a bass guitar and you ask me to improvise something, or even be with some musicians and follow them, I wouldn't be able to do it. And I want to change that.

I have a great ability to improvise verbally, and I am very funny on a dime.

Trump is not haphazard. Trump has the ability to improvise at a rally or go off the prompter at some point.

There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that's a real skill.

You would never hear any song played twice in the same way. The words were retained, but within a certain frame there was great latitude, and the musician could improvise to his heart's content; and the more the variations and combinations, the greater the musician.

I'm not a real musician. If you give me a bass guitar and you ask me to improvise something, or even be with some musicians and follow them, I wouldn't be able to do it. And I want to change that. I want to be able to be in a group and take my guitar and play with them, without someone showing me, "Okay, you're going to do this and that," because music has always been a big part of my life.

I've always thought that I'm not really a guitar player, but I just practised so much that I developed into a kind of a bit of a musician, but I've often doubted my musical ear. If someone sings me a melody, I have to improvise on that melody, because I can't retain the information they've given me. That's why I still practise today, I suppose, because I still feel inadequate.

I've never been a big fan of improvisation, because I think you appreciate the process and the cleverness of it more than the actual comedy in most cases.