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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.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Painting
Writing
Playing
Eros
Kind
Looking
Swept
Love
Reading
Composing
Fall
Submit
Away
Require
Transformation
Happens
Listening
Self

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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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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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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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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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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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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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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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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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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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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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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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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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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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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