Improvisational Freedom Quotes

The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.

Jazz isn't like pop, where you sell millions of records with a hit. Your spirit and soul aren't important in pop music. But jazz is like classical music. If people like you, they'll remember you and you'll last forever.

Without a band, I'm much more free to improvise.

With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom.

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.

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

In theatre you can't ad lib, so you want to pick really good material, like David Mamet or Shakespeare or whatever. You want to be really careful about what you do. But in the movies, you do have more wiggle-room. You do have more opportunities to improvise. It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script.

My solo playing utilizes the deployment of suggestive psychic rhythms. I'll state these throughout a given piece and play thematic improvisations on top of that. I like to suggest that rhythmic movement without always playing it. I like to create openings that I can step into.