Improvisation means coming to the situation without rigid expectations or preconceptions. The key to improvisation is motion — you keep going forward, fearful or not, living from moment to moment. That’s how life is.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

I don't want anything to get in the way of me and my singing. I want my mind as clear as possible.

Music is so powerful, it needs to be used for some kind of redeeming work. To lift peoples spirits, to lift their souls.

If I stand there, appreciating the world around me as full of amazing sounds and the possibility of new ones, I think that invites other people to see the world that way, too. I love sharing the experience of singing with people, and I love sharing my stories. But when it comes to teaching, I have a lot of help.

I’m not a scholar or a psychologist, so I don’t really think about why. But I do think about what it means to sing to and with people, to offer music to them, and to ask them to spend time with me.

When we listen to improvisational jazz, or solo classical violinists, the way they phrase and inflect melodies feels vocal, like they’re talking to us. When I was figuring out how to perform solo, I wanted to move back and forth between bass riffs, melody, and harmony, so I often used sounds instead of — or alongside — the words of a song. I found that if I sang a line using the consonants, vowels, shadings, and inflection we recognize as human language sounds, people responded as if I were talking to them.