I can easily explain what leaves me cold about a musician like Elton John, why his songs don’t hold me musically or lyrically. And yet, there he is in Spinal Tap, gently mocking himself. There he is again, lifting Leon Russell up at the end of Russell’s life. Suddenly my certainty falters. What I had dismissed as one-dimensional turns out to carry another layer. Those are the best moments: when something I thought had only one meaning reveals a second, a third. This is what I keep circling as I try to frame what improvisation really is. It’s the recognition that you do not know what comes next. That’s why we favour one soloist over another not for technical mastery alone but for the possibility of surprise. Please, astonish me.

I listen widely, even promiscuously: Charlie Kirk beside Noam Chomsky, Candace Owens beside Hamza Yusuf, Jordan Peterson beside Ana Kasparian, Fox News beside The View, Glenn Greenwald beside Ben Shapiro, Judith Butler beside J. K. Rowling, Finkelstein beside Destiny, the expected beside the unexpected. Just listening doesn’t mean agreeing, but presuming I already know what each voice will say, that is a kind of ignorance. What I find instead is a shifting landscape: complexity mingled with self-righteousness, conspiracies jostling against careful arguments, and at the end of the day, my own beliefs forced to stand up and be tested. Improvisation, then, is not only in music, it is in the act of listening itself, of allowing contradiction to unsettle us, of being surprised into reconsideration.