I said before that jamming with those mystery musicians in Asheville was like conversation, like talking. This is because, though we were strangers and hadn’t met before, we already spoke the same language, to the point of being able to comfortably improvise and embellish upon each other’s uses of it. This is Fred Moten’s way of viewing improvisation which, he says, “is located at a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between feeling and reflection, disarmament and preparation, speech and writing.” The “speech” of improvisation is immediate and ad hoc, while the “writing” of improvisation involves laying something down that can be returned to later. It is this combination that leads Moten to call improvisation “speech without foresight.”[7] It lacks foresight because it cannot see what is coming and so is driven to constantly adapt and make use of whatever is there, even as it is still arriving. But there’s an undeniable element of futurity—Moten calls it “prophecy”—that arises from such processes. To improvise is to anticipate and plan without working toward a definite outcome. It’s a form of prophecy without pronouncement, a way of imagining the future without committing to the limitations of what that future has to be.