Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

If a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing.

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.

The idea of improvisation means that we confront ourselves with our own individual creativity.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

An error may be only an unintentional rightness... Do not get too fussy about how every part of the thing sounds. Go ahead. All processes are at first awkward and clumsy and "funny". Do not be afraid of being wrong; just be afraid of being uninteresting.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Research on jazz musicians shows that people don't just pull stuff out of the air when they're improvising. These are people with an extremely wide knowledge of musical genres. They have always practiced and practiced and practiced.

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.

Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

Stravinsky said that composition is selective improvisation, meaning that the same kernel of an idea that you have up on the stand as a jazz musician is the same one you write down as a composer.

You're just sort of searching for this "thing" and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

There are wonderful things in real jazz, the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

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

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.

An improvisation is like a building. If well constructed, it will please us for a long time, either in memory or in stone. The Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio said that a building must be considered "with due reference to function, structure, and beauty".

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was improvising before I was reading music. I was just trying to play things on the clarinet by ear. I think my ear is one of my greatest assets.

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

I've been singing since I was 5 years old. Not in-the-church-thing kind of way. I always made up music. Since I was a little girl. Improvisation was with me from the beginning. It drove my parents crazy. I would sing all the time. To anything. I loved to imitate the sounds.

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