The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview. Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it’s where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?

I believe that when you leave one genre and become a performer of another, things change. I have been part of the relatively new movement where you come out with a salsa record, for instance, and the anticipated hit comes with a ballad version and another pop version. I like that because this way I can reach many more people who may otherwise be limited by the genre.

And ultimately, the more you allow yourself to be present outside of your comfort zone and open up to varying experiences and people, the richer and more informed your views and perceptions become

The base of the work is one of individuals believing in themselves, trusting themselves in the moment and being accepting of themselves and the people around them. In order to improvise in front of an audience, you have to be accepting, involved in the moment and courageous. Those issues, when transferred over to general communication, makes the communication richer and helps in all areas of life.

I think what happens with classical music is that there is a concrete expectation of how it's done. For some people, that's their jam and I applaud that. I'm too sloppy of a classical player to be able to do that consistently. I want to hear colour and I want to hear and play something I've never played before. So that’s really where jazz came into it. You're learning a conversation, musically speaking, and then you're putting your own phrase into that.

While in improvisation there is a sense of craft within one's own instrument and in being able to interact with other musicians, in noise this disappears to the extent of anti-virtuosity becoming a virtue. A nihilist approach to improvisation in which the interaction is not based upon developing common denominators for some communication to happen among the players, but rather a matter of developing the freedom of individual expression.

I think more audiences would like contemporary music if they were presented with it, told about it. It's just a matter of familiarity, I think. Then one begins to look back at old music as stuffy, or even tiresome. It's funny -- I'm beginning to like older music more than I used to, but it's like I'm going into a museum and contemplating a Rembrandt. It just feels like its part of the aristocratic class system of kings and queens and dukes which just doesn't exist anymore.

Jazz music is a lifestyle. It’s not notes, chords and arpeggios. Today’s improvisation is too based on the knowledge of chords and the way they practice the chords. It’s not a melodic thing anymore like the older days. It was much more important to play shorter and to play more variable, valid stuff. Today, a lot of solos are long and uninteresting and the influence usually comes from John Coltrane’s group. He himself was a master musician, but he put so much emphasis on chord knowledge and technique, and now the kids want to show how fast they can play. This is the same with piano players and most instrumentalists—it’s speed. That’s gonna change again and hopefully the kids who are now 16 and 17 years old have a little more sense and maybe some more stories to tell.

I spent a lot of time teaching myself theory and harmony so I could be free to express myself on the instrument. I learned what relatives and substitutes could be played against a root of a chord, like E minor related to G, and so forth. I've also gathered all this knowledge because for ten years all I've done is play jazz, every day.

[Sights enabling musical inspiration] The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician [...] Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique.

I have found that when players break their habitual patterns, they can greatly extend the limits of their own style and explore subdued aspects of their personality.

And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.