It's kind of like being a writer in the sense that you always hear other writers say, 'Well, the best way to start writing is to just start writing.' The same goes for improvisation. You want to start improvising, just start playing notes. And the more you do that, the more comfortable - or not comfortable - but I guess how you're able to adapt to situations. You become more familiar with your instrument. As soon as you have a musical thought, you can go ahead and add to that musical thought and know your way around.

People always say that music is a universal language. It was very, very true. We could show up anywhere with any people speaking different languages and we could just be like, "You want to play that song? Yeah, okay." We would usually want to play Latin American songs, and they would usually want to play Santana or Jimi Hendrix and stuff like that. So we would trade off. So yeah, we were able to make a lot of friends that way and meet a lot of local musicians. It was a great experience.

The amazing thing about the cistern is that, if you're improvising in a dead room, you play your note and then you're left with your thoughts and you have to be really quick on your feet and be able to move through many different musical thoughts seamlessly. Improvising there is just, like, you play a note and then you had at least ten seconds to think, "What would be the perfect accompanying note to that?" And then you could add that note. You can just build this puzzle that was really amazing.

Of course, right away I got more interested in the far-out jazz than the traditional jazz, so I quickly was turned onto the John Zorn scene and all the wild stuff coming out of New York and Europe. Improvising is a pretty natural thing for me.

I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play jazz.

Being raised on a boat felt like it was totally normal to me. I was just another kid hanging out, doing this and that. My girlfriend and I had a funny period of time where I was always wanting to hug her all the time. I looked at my brother and he's the same way. It wasn't that our family was necessarily more affectionate than others. It was that we were basically sitting on top of each other, or side by side squished in together all the time. Because the boat was that small. It became part of our nature to be close to people.

Usually when you're playing with other people in not such a reverberant room, you have to be quick on your feet and think about stuff really quickly. But inside the cistern, it was almost like I was at home on my computer arranging and taking time thinking about the next step, the next note. Instead, the room was my collaborator. I could hear the note and sit there and think. I could be arranging as I was going in real time, which was fascinating.