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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Discover
Call
Learn
Action
Way
Improvisation
Muse
Respond
Intuition

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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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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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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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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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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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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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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 power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around...The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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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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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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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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