If you're truly playing improvised music, I don't care who you are or where you come from, you don't know what's going to happen. I feel essentially we really don't know anything anyway, most of the times we're just guessing.
Hamid DrakeIf you say you have an empty mind and you don't have an empty mind, you only know later that you have an empty mind. Because if you say you have empty mind, you don't have empty mind, because you're already thinking about it.
Hamid DrakeWhen I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language.
Hamid DrakeMusicians are affected by the audience just as much as audiences are affected by the musicians. The only problem is that often times musicians won't allow themselves to admit to that fact.
Hamid Drake