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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: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Trash
Judgement
Littles
Little
Much
Blockage

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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 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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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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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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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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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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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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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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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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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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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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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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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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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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