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.
I know there are some actors who are just brilliant at improvising and brilliant at just being in the moment and doing it there and then. I'm not one of those actors.
Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.
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.
When you're improvising, it's fun to find something that you can lean on that is similar to your life experience. In my opinion, that's very helpful.
When I'm in the studio, when I'm warm, when I'm what people call improvising, I feel a very special connection. I feel the most right. I don't want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they're in the best order at that particular moment.
I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life.
Americans have been good at improvising for a long time, but in the last few decades, we have gotten very sloppy about the rote memorization of facts. That's a discipline issue. You need the rote skill in order to have something to improvise off of, otherwise you are simply playing air guitar.
This word gets overused in describing actors but I think it applies to Mike [Tyson] in this case - he was totally fearless. He jumped in and played with us comedically and improvised a lot. A lot of jokes in those scenes with him are from him improvising.
But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.
Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music.
The key to writing for Richard (Pryor) was to just push his buttons and then know when to push the buttons on your cassette recorder. You'd get him started, then surreptitiously start recording when he got inspired and started walking around the room and improvising in character. Then you'd get it all transcribed and take credit for it.
I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.
I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.
Everybody improvises without noticing it. Life is about improvising. You can't control what happens in your life, I mean, you don't know what can happen in your life today. So you somehow improvise.
A lot of lines in movies were written, but I'm always improvising. Once you get into the scene, it just comes to me.
I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just that you're standing up.
I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.
I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it.
Wherever inspiration comes from, it's like I'll hear a melody and chords, almost a rough structure of the whole thing [song]. I'll just hear it and chase what's in my head. The rest comes from jamming with band, improvising, seeing what comes up as well. I'll come up with it off the top of my head, catch it, sing and hum, and if something is missing, just jam, and that's the [songwriting] process.
For the most part, improvising while cameras are rolling is very difficult. 99% of people you should never ask to do that, because they're under pressure, the clock is running, 80 people are staring at you...it's always unnatural.
Sometimes you'll have great actors who aren't comfortable with improvising. Which can get pretty frustrating. But every actor's coming from a different place and they have their own strengths and weaknesses and your job is to sell them as two people in the same world. Some of them have to have their hands held and some I just let loose entirely.
Any changes that I made to my line, I asked if I could make them, which I do in every movie. So far everybody's been gracious enough to say yes. The only improvising I do is in the movies I do with Chris Guest, which is what we do.
As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender business.
Dr. Okun. Who's named after a special-effects guy named Jeff Okun, who had done Stargate for Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who did Independence Day. But "Brakish" just came up one day when Jeff Goldblum and I were improvising, and he told me his character's name and I told him mine.
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