Improvisation Music Quotes & Sayings

People have their own interests and they want to play a certain kind of music. People want to play in orchestras. They want to play on Broadway. Those that want to play traditional jazz and have no interests in the ideas of improvisation. So in spit of the fact that there are fifty violin players, you might only narrow it down to ten and within those ten, there might only be three who have the right kind of background and credentials to deal with what you need to deal with. Everybody's got their own special thing that they are after and a lot of times you don't have time to be training people. — Henry Threadgill

You discover over time that music can be overwhelming. Unless the musicians involved understand this they can lose audiences. Spontaneity and improvisation are salient features but I also strive to make music that is peaceful. I want to make music that aids world peace in the same way that the people who shaped my development did. — Bennie Maupin

Composing is improvisation slowed down. — Wayne Shorter

Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation. — Derek Bailey

Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction ... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language. — Evan Parker

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own. — Sonny Rollins

During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music's key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections.
[...] Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers. — Ted Gioia

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

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden

The music of the Gypsies belongs in the sphere of improvisation rather than in any other, without which it would have no power to exist. — Franz Liszt

Well David "Fathead" Newman was my first experience with improvisation. When I saw him play for the first time I realized that there is an importance of spontaneous music being made on the spot. It was so soulful and singing through his horn. So that's how I was inspired early on. — Roy Hargrove

Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity. — Van Morrison

I wanted to look at the mentality that can breed that sort of intensity, that kind of cutthroat, pressure-cooker feeling, especially a form of music like jazz, that should be - or you'd think should be - all about liberation and improvisation and everything. — Damien Chazelle

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

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground. — John McLaughlin

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

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

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody. — Wynton Marsalis

I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow - there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance. — Charlie Haden

Thorny compositions that sound as if female teen punkers the Shaggs received doctorates in the music of 12-tone composer Alban Berg, and then rewrote their Philosophy of the World ... Carefully notated structures and interplay morph effortlessly into free improvisation that is intelligent and expressive, but never self-indulgent. Also featuring intense lyrics sung with their clear and melodic voices, the two women make transcendent chamber music outside of any genre. — Elliott Sharp

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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

There is indeed a level of improvisation where we can distort and shuffle the music patterns, samples, and loops in each phase of the show within fixed cue points, but at the same time there is a constant result that we are trying to achieve each night while performing and operating our system - quite similar in spirit to a broadway show for example: If you go see a musical two nights in a row, the performances are different yet similar. — Thomas Bangalter

They were looking for actors - real actors - who could play instruments. There was a lot of improvisation and scene work involved in addition to the music. The auditions went on for a long time. — Micky Dolenz

I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it's not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it's the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It's all spontaneous, and it's all love, and from the heart. — Horace Silver

The problem that I have is with the music business. For some reason it seems almost impossible to get anything, any music, released which includes improvisation or soloing. — Jan Hammer

And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it. — DJ Jazzy Jeff

The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience. — David Steinberg

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

Improvisation is the art of becoming sound. It is the only art in which a human being can and must become the music he or she is making. Improvisation is the only musical art which predicated entirely on human trust and love. — Alvin Curran

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world. — Damien Chazelle

I really think that martial arts and music are very close to each other and both require a lot of focus and improvisation because you don't know where or when you're going to get kicked! — Hiromi

In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it's usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It's a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there's a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything
intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music's like that."
From "Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation" by Ben Watson, Verso, London, 2004, p. 440. — Derek Bailey

Most of my music is improvisation, and composition is improvisation. Even if I have a score, it is improvisation. — Yoshi Wada

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now. — Richard Grossman

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art. — Tom Robbins

Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch). — Michael Snow

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008. — Greg Egan

Hendrix was back there with a few of the others who were like my training wheels ... hearing him as a teenager taught me to look at the guitar in a different way - and how to tap into that thing inside of me that was already leaning toward improvisation. You learn other players' licks at first; then you take off the training wheels and start using the licks as building blocks to make your own thing. That's how influences work. somewhere in whatever I do, there's a little bit of Hendrix - plus about a hundred others — Junior Brown

Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action. — Greg Thomas

I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation. — Ryan Adams

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience. — Henri Matisse

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable. — Wynton Marsalis

I approach music and acting the same way, through spontaneous improvisation. I never really try to rehearse anything, do it over and over, except when we're inside a take. — Matt Schulze

I want the music to be heard as close to when I made it, as much as possible. I don't want to get into some "future of the music industry" thing, or where I stand on digital this or that, but I think it's ridiculous that a lot of people in the industry plan so far ahead that it makes a lot of improvisation impossible and makes a lot of people's expectations fixed and not fluid. — Bradford Cox

There's a relationship between music and spirituality and inspiration and to a certain extent improvisation that draws me in, because I don't totally understand it. I know that those relationships have been telling me, since I started making records, where to go. What to write down. — M. Ward

In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: "In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds." His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds. — Frederic Rzewski

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it! — Art Tatum

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors ... And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making ... Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation. — Derek Bailey

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds. — Steve Lacy

Her Triumph
I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us. — W.B.Yeats

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation. — John Burnside

I've always been interested in shaping music in odd ways, with odd riffs and that's been probably something that I've continued on with my studies with improvisation as I'm working with people. — Roscoe Mitchell

Here's how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It's your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don't have to be good or even interesting. It's you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours. — Twyla Tharp