Cannot possibly say enough good things about M'bilia Bel, by the way. Imagine happy fado, a music that intends so great a surplus of joy that listeners fall down crying. My experience of fado is pretty much limited to the work of Amália Rodrigues, who creates ecstatic sadness; all the first-hand witnesses to fado I'm related to confirm what I've only experienced on record.

"The petrifying effect of European classical music on those things it touches -- jazz, many folk musics, and all popular musics have suffered grievously in their contact with it -- made the prospect of finding improvisation there pretty remote. Formal, precious, self-absorbed, pompous, harbouring rigid conventions and carefully preserved hierarchical distinctions; obsessed with its geniuses and their timeless masterpieces, shunning the accidental and the unexpected: the world of classical music provides an unlikely setting for improvisation." Derek Bailey, my hero.

UPDATE: should mention that Bailey's writing in his book Improvisation, not weighing in ex officio on a musical school of quietude. Should also mention that I enjoy European classical music, petrified forests, and hierarchical distinctions. Fertile beds for spontaneity they may not be, but neither do I want to get all cultic about prohibiting sharply the rehearsed response.