Wynton Marsalis said in a 2010 interview: “Well, the quality of improvisation, the quality of your thought and the depth of your feeling comes out when you improvise. So, you do want to get in front of 3,000 people and just toss it off. That’s what you want to do. Not to imply that there’s no thought behind it. It’s just that when you sit down to write down what it is that you’re thinking, just the act of you writing it down makes you refine it a certain way, for better or for worse. It’s not even to say that a composition is better than an improvisation. Because you can believe what Bach probably played in some churches is far superior to what he wrote down. Of course, Bach and Beethoven were known as great improvisers, so you can believe some nights when they really were on, they were playing stuff that they only wished they could remember to write down. And then also they had the instrument. When you improvise you can do things that you wouldn’t be able to do if it was written down. Somebody presented Coltrane with one of his solos once in a written form, and he said, ‘can you play that?’ And Coltrane looked at it and said, ‘just the complexity of ideas and the relationships and the technical feat — it would be very difficult to do that, reading it or playing it as an artifact.’”
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