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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 73
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Trash
Judgement
Littles
Little
Much
Blockage

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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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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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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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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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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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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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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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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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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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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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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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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 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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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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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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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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