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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
Billions
Evolution
Improviser
Three
Formless
Doe
Vacuums
Years
Vacuum
Operate
Organic
Billion

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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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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.
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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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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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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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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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