On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, during the climax of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was sitting on the platform near her friend Martin Luther King. Dr. King had begun reading his prepared address. Seven paragraphs into the speech, Jackson broke in and shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!”

King pushed aside his notes and began improvising.

His written text did not mention dreams. As he looked up at the crowd and rolled into the rhythmic majesty of “I have a dream,” Dr. King was riffing on part of an earlier speech he had given at Cobo Hall in Detroit but that he felt had not worked very well; he was riffing on bits from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Lincoln, from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The ghost of Gandhi was never far. Though we can identify the deep roots of King’s words, the innumerable strands and influences had been collectively digested, absorbed, and integrated. The interbeing of many is expressed in the voice of each of us. We recognize King’s courage and brilliance, but he was not some solitary genius spinning “creativity” out of whole cloth. There are no such geniuses. This is what it is to be human: to learn and assimilate the patterns of culture, community, and environment, both conscious and unconscious, and alter them as needed, make them ours, so that the voice spontaneously emerging is our voice, interdependent with the human world in which we live. Thus we breathe life into art and art into life.

Improvising means coming prepared, but not being attached to the preparation. Everything flows into the creative act in progress. Come prepared, but be willing to accept interruptions and invitations. Trust that the product of your preparation is not your papers and plans, but yourself. Know that no solo is solo: even one of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century was helped into existence by a good friend’s blurted reminder.

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Introduction

I have been a professional improviser for more than forty years. I’ve taught workshops from Germany to Argentina to Japan. I’ve played a black electric violin in a Buddhist temple, and a three-century-old viola d’amore in the Large Hadron Collider. This book is the trace of decades spent traveling around collaborating with, teaching, and learning from ever-widening circles of people. It has grown from playing with music, words, movement, images, and even computer code, learning about the forms and interdependent patterns of play. Such play is a way not only of connecting with people but of discovering the connections that were already present but unsuspected.

Those of us who gravitate toward improvisational music do so because we enjoy relating to other human beings as equals. That is the core of the experience for me. That is the chief relevance of our practice for the world beyond art. Our work, at its most genuine, can bring us into a living model of social openness through the practice of listening. In a world where people are prone to retreating into academic, aesthetic, and professional cubbyholes, where people are divided by the fault lines of very real racial, gender, and economic inequity, there is an ever-pressing need for this kind of practice.

When asked to define improvising, I say I play music that is less than five minutes old. Yet it is ancient, in that the sounds that attract me have an archaic feel. When it is truly happening I feel I am lightly touching something deep in culture, deep in genetics, deep in our animal nature — a fundamental connection to others. Making art, whether you do it solo or in a group, derives its patterns from everything around us, in an interdependent network. We learn to work as nature does, with the material of ourselves: our body, our mind, our companions, and the radical possibilities of the present moment.

In my twenties I met another young American, a Zen Buddhist priest. He spoke of doing zazen — sitting meditation — as practice. The word practice is consistently used to describe meditative activity; I had heard and read it many times before, but that day, for some reason, it hit me between the eyes. I am a musician, I thought, and now I know what practice is. Music, dance, sports, medicine, sitting still on a cushion in a state of concentrated awareness: all are forms of practice, skilled disciplines of doing and being what you are rather than some preparatory work to get to a goal. So began for me a lifelong exploration of the Buddha dharma, the Tao, and other traditions East and West that link up to artistic practice. And with a Buddhist perspective, I began to link improvising with the other imps: impermanence and imperfection. I learned to relish these essential qualities of life and art. And above all, I came to see art-making not as a matter of displaying skill but of awakening and realizing altruistic intentions.

When I was even younger, I was sure I was going to be a biologist. Then a psychologist. I was fascinated by living organisms: bodies, minds, social relations, play. The first article I ever published was in the Journal of Protozoology. I was enthralled by how a single cell can perform all of life’s essential activities, sustain itself in an environment, swim, hunt, interact with others. That protean quality

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