Quotes About Jazz Improvisation

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

Ahmad Jamal

#2. There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

David Antin

#3. 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.

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Sonny Rollins

#7. I have lived too long in foreign parts

Henry James

#8. There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

Henri Matisse

#9. Sometimes I need to be a stranger to myself. Only then my soul can show me not what I want, but what I need to see.

Paulo Coelho

#10. If you go back to the roots of jazz, it was all about COLLECTIVE improvisation.

Henry Threadgill

#11. Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

Alan Arkin

#12. The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

Jan Garbarek

#13. If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we'd have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they're erratic. People do crazy things that don't make sense.

Sara Sheridan

#14. What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.

John Edgar Wideman

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

Mose Allison

#16. You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.

Anais Nin

#17. Now as a former welfare recipient, I don't have a problem with expecting people to work to earn money. But where I come from we call that a job, not volunteerism.

LZ Granderson

#18. 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

#19. Load up our guns
Bring your friends
It's fun to lose
and to pretend

Kurt Cobain

#20. 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

#21. As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty.

Doc Childre

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.

Miroslav Vitous

#25. Successful startups are just like jazz bands, masters of improvisation marching to syncopated beats

Mark Anthony Peterson

#26. Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

Cecil Taylor

#27. Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.

Chuck Mangione

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

Ken Burns

#29. 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

#30. Composing is improvisation slowed down.

Wayne Shorter

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.

Iris Apfel

#34. Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

Wynton Marsalis