Creativity Quote by Keith Emerson

Emerson is admitting, with a musician’s casual bravado, that some of the most high-wire “virtuosity” in late-60s prog was engineered chaos. Playing a Hammond “back to front” isn’t just a quirky physical trick; it’s a declaration of method. The organ becomes less a polite keyboard and more a machine you wrestle with, a stage prop and a sound laboratory at once. In 1968, with the Nice straddling rock spectacle and classical aspiration, that mattered: this was an era when rock musicians were trying to outrun three-chord expectations without surrendering the crowd’s appetite for drama.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the myth that complexity equals control. Emerson describes “choosing notes at random” not as incompetence but as a compositional strategy performed in real time: throw the dice, then make meaning fast enough that it sounds inevitable. That’s the tightrope of improvisation, especially in a style that later got caricatured as overplanned and self-serious. He’s telling you the opposite: the real engine was risk.

“Trying to make some sense of them” is the revealing phrase. It frames the performance as problem-solving, not ornament. The audience sees flare; the musician feels triage. That tension explains why Emerson’s work still lands: the drama isn’t only theatrical (knives in keys, rotated organs), it’s structural. He’s staging the moment when disorder becomes pattern, and inviting you to hear intelligence not in perfection, but in recovery.