My favorite improv quote is a paraphrase from Free Play, the mother of all improvisation books by Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Question: How do you improvise?
Answer: What’s stopping you?
What’s stopping us is ourselves and the educational system, especially the current system of music education. The system is very efficient at teaching us a lot of things and very well. It just leaves out one thing: thinking for ourselves. All the thinking has been done far away by experts, who are (apparently the only ones) allowed to think up stuff. After all, if we tried it, we would certainly make mistakes and be less than perfect, and who wants that?
We should all want that. “Mistakes” (so-called) are wonderful opportunities to discover something that the distant experts never thought of. This country was built on the gumption and curiosity of people who tried stuff. A lot of interesting stuff came from a “mistake”, i.e. an unpredicted result of trying stuff and seeing what happens, such as Teflon, vulcanized rubber, penicillin, x-rays, the ice cream cone, the Frisbee, Silly Putty, Post-It notes, Super Glue, Splenda, corn flakes, the microwave oven, fireworks, Play-Doh, potato chips, and um… America.
