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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Three
Formless
Doe
Vacuums
Years
Vacuum
Operate
Organic
Billion
Billions
Evolution
Improviser

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Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.
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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
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Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one.
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Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.
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As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business I am in the surrender business.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of just anything.
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Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions therefore, it is sometimes painful.
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If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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There is not ultimate breakthrough what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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