Marisa Anderson on improvising

I grew up playing classical. In classical music, there’s a boss. What’s on the page is the boss. What the composer intended, that’s the boss. In classical music, you’re not your own boss ever. That’s fine, that’s for a reason. Any song that’s sung tends to lend itself to having a structure that you have to follow. Words are the boss, a lot of times. They’re the boss of how a song goes, when it starts and when it ends, and what order the emotions lay out in.

I’m not against structure. I’m not even against doing things the same way. But in the creative process, I like to be free. Once it’s the performance, there’s room for all of it in my music. Some things I do exactly the same, and that’s its own fun thing, is to adhere to that. Some things I do differently. In performance, what changes is the dynamic in the room.