Im⋅pro⋅vise (dictionary definition)

1. To compose and perform or deliver without previous preparation; extemporize.

2. To compose, play, recite, or sing (verse, music, etc.) on the spur of the moment.

3. To make, provide, or arrange from whatever materials are readily available.

Stephen Nachmanovich

“In a sense all art is improvisation. Finished artwork that we see and may deeply love are the relics or traces of a journey that has come and gone. What we reach through improvisation is the feel of the journey itself.”

Bobby McFerrin

“I've always felt that singing a song without words makes one song a thousand songs because the people who hear it can bring their own stories to it."

"...one of the most direct ways of praying and meditating is through singing, and singing in community is exceptionally powerful. You get people together in a room and get them singing, and you instantly knock down all the walls, the creeds, the gender, age and race differences, everything. You’re all one at that point, lifting your voices.”

JP Mercury Pekau

“Improvisation, for me, is also an undressing. I look for the deeper layers, the greater nourishment in sound. My mind becomes quiet, and sounds emerge from an inner life current. I tune in to this life energy, and it's a great source of healing. When you join in, fantastic connection and transformation can happen.”

Martha Graham

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy...that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Albert Einstein

“Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Charlie Parker

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn." 

International Society for Improvised Music

“When Charlie Parker stated that “if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” he conveyed, in his inimitable way, the capacity of improvisation to serve as a vehicle for integrating the totality of influences that shape personal and social identity. From class, culture, economics, and ecology to gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality; improvising musicians spontaneously meld these and other aspects of their being in expressions that serve as both profound personal and collective commentaries. In an era in which unprecedented levels of superficiality, alienation, and violence often overshadow a growing interest in creative and transpersonal development, and where an ever escalating morass of data threatens to engulf a genuine cross-fertilization between disciplines and cultures; the importance of a creative vehicle for accessing and expressing one’s inner and outer worlds has never been greater.”

“Improvisation not only excels in this regard, it also—through the very moment-to-moment decision making sequences that require individuals to penetrate beyond ordinary patterns of behavior —may exemplify the dissolution of provincial and nationalistic tendencies that divide communities and countries in our politically fragile world. Improvisation, in fact, may be the ultimate lens through which the quest for self and community is revealed to be as much a collective as a personal endeavor.”

Ysaye Barnwell

“When you sing, you take a position in the universe.”

Kurt Elling

It’s only at the corpuscular level of exploration that the really important discoveries begin. Know that you will never exhaust the possibilities. You will exhaust yourself. That’s the job.”

Shay Nichols

“Tap, tap, tap into the infinite wisdom of sound.”

Patti Shaffner

“When singing becomes about listening, not about being heard, then the song at last has a chance to be sung.”