I'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet. I really had no thoughts of actually working as a professional musician until my high school counselor called me into his office one day and said, 'You know, Bobby, you're about to graduate. Have you made any plans about your future? Have you thought about what you're going to do when you get to college?' And I just automatically said music. I hadn't really thought about it, but I thought, well I guess I'll be a musician. It was pretty much like that.

So I went to California State University, the composition department, and I studied composition and orchestration and things like that. Then I left that school and I went to Cerritos College, which was in southern California; they had one of the best big band programs in the country at the time.

When I was 27 years old I was walking home from a dance class -- I was accompanying dancers at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City -and the idea of singing just fell upon me. I was primarily a pianist and then that day I just knew all of a sudden that I was not a pianist and that I was a singer. The timing was perfect, I think, because I started working right away.

When I got home from the walk this idea was still in my head so I called some of the hotels in town because I knew there were piano bars. I called the Hilton Hotel, and it just so happened that the manager of the room was there that day and he said, 'You can come down tomorrow and sing for me.' So I did. I prepared five songs. I sang 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life', 'Come Down Off Your Throne and Leave Your Body Alone...' by Blind Faith and three others I don't remember the names of.

The manager said, 'Do you do more material?' And I said, 'Yes' -- fortunately he didn't ask me to sing anything else. He hired me. I had about a month before my gig actually started so I made myself learn a song a day. By the time I started I had about 35 songs.

I had been enamored with the work that Keith Jarrett was doing as a solo pianist, and I was always interested in how vulnerable that was for a musician to simply walk out on stage and courageously sit down at a piano and just play it -- I found that really fascinating. I mean, who was doing that? It asked me the questions for which I was seeking answers: "What is it you want to do? Do you want to explore music this way?" And my answer was yes, and it was Keith who did that.

And so my goal was to be a solo vocalist. That was primarily what I was focusing towards. I wanted to be able to do that, because I figured if I could sing alone and I find, pull the essence out of music, pull the inner being, pull the harmonies and do it somehow by myself, that would make me a better collaborator in the long run. It would somehow make it easier for me to work. But I had to do this. I had to do the solo stuff. This was my goal. I've always been in love with the vulnerability of a person, alone, on stage, playing. There was something very fascinating to me about that. "How could they do that?" How could you be on stage by yourself? With no support, and you're doing it on your own. I had to find about that, I had to explore that.

It took me at least 2 years, 3 years, of going into a room by myself and turning on a tape recorder and singing before I felt comfortable singing in front of other people. I was afraid to sing around anyone. I was intimidated by the sound of my own voice. I would wait until the house was empty and then I would sing. So it took time. It took six years before I did my first solo concert. So it took about six years of singing constantly, doing a lot of practicing. For the first two years I didn't listen to another singer. Because I wanted to find what my voice sounded like. Knowing myself, I'm very impressionable. It would have been very easy for me to shop around for a singer whose technique I liked, and use that as my base and try and do what they did, but I made the conscious decision not to do that. I just wanted to make sure that I had a strong base of my own, because I could easily flounder by going out and just copping somebody else's licks. I used to do that as a piano player and I knew that wasn't going to get me anywhere.

So I would go into a room, turn on a tape recorder and sing. Then I started noticing some things I was able to do with my voice that all of a sudden became very interesting and very useful. I worked on a technique, singing one note at a time that would suggest that there was more going on than there actually was. I hear people say, 'How do you sing more than one note at a time?' It was simply finding a technique that allowed me to explore the voice in as deeply a manner as possible

"I worked really hard trying to find out who I was as a singer. In the very beginning , I purposely stayed away from listening to a lot of singers. I workshopped and turned on the tape recorder just to see what I sounded like, because I knew that I could be easily influenced by someone else's style or phrasing. I just wanted to make sure that I had a strong base of my own, because I could easily flounder by going out and just copping somebody else's licks. I use to do that as a piano player and I knew that wasn't going to get me anywhere. So my singing had to be very, very different

But it took years before I got pass the point where I would even sing in a room with other people, because I was afraid. I still get nervous. I'm still afraid. when I walk out and begin, because you just don't know. Improvisation is so risky. You just never know what's going to happen and it's a fearful kind of thing, but that kind of wonderful fearful kind of thing. It's the kind of fear you want to feel. So you have to listen to yourself. I'm so tired of these melismatic singers nowadays - all these singers, these young kids - everybody is singing the same kind of way. So go off in a room by yourself. Take a 40 day fast from music, and just sing. Find out what you sound like. It's hard to do, but it's really worth it.

I am passionately committed to improvisation, and don't think that any music student in the country should be allowed to graduate unless they've studies it for a term, a year. They need to get back to their own music making, get past the paper. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven - they were all great improvisers. What we have now has been written down, and we forget that it began as improvisation. In some ways, the best part of their music making has been lost.

Improvisation is basically movement - the courage to take steps. You play one note. And then you play another note. That's it. You just keep going. They don't have to go together melodically, or be in a scale; movement is the important thing. You don't have to know anything about theory, you don't have to know what you're doing. Kids don't. Three, four, five year old kids don't know any music theory when they sing. They don't know what a 'picardi third' is. They don't know what an 'Ionian mode' is. Or a 'Dorian mode'. Major minor thirds. They just sing.

When you get older, it's harder and harder to improvise. Part of the problem is that judgmental voice that says what you're doing doesn't sound right. I used to have students do drawings of their own 'judges' - and then we'd crumple them up and throw them into the trash. We all have these thoughts, these inhibitions. I had them too; I had to 'exorcise my demons'.

When I was developing my own approach to improvisation, the only thing I had to practice was getting over the fear of doing it. I think that's the only thing that really hampers people from improvising: they're just afraid of looking like a fool or not having enough ideas. It's a risk. Most people are afraid of it. It's like opening a door to a dark room and going in. You don't know what you'll find. But I find that fascinating.

The best way to start improve is to just do it. sing . Improvise every day for about ten minutes. Get a cooking timer, set it up for ten minutes and go. At the end of two minutes you're going to start getting very, very bored. Two minutes are going to go by and you're going to think, 'What is this all about? I don't know how to do this; I don't know what I'm doing, etcetera, etcetera.' Keep going. Don't stop. It's like Natalie Goldberg's book, Writing Down the Bones: keep your hands moving. It's the same with improvisation. Just keep going. Even if you're just singing one note. Go for ten minutes and don't stop. That's it. You just move. Just keep moving. Motion.

You can talk about structure, making it last longer, but you have to start with those first steps. Some people freeze up and stand there, thinking they have nothing to play. You've got everything to play: your morning breakfast cereal, the misunderstanding you had with your teenage son last night before you went to bed, your emotions - you can lay them all!

It doesn't matter where you land. Just the act of leaping is where it's at for me. That's the big lesson: the process. I've heard this from all kinds of people who call themselves artists - that it's not so much the final result, it's the joy of the journey that's the important thing.