I'll tell you something that one of my main music profs told me, Ferret.

"There are no wrong notes in Jazz.. Only brilliant improvisation."

Another thing I was told early on was that if you mess up a note when improvising, like miss and hit one that really *klangs* instead of the nice one you had in mind? Do it again! And then do it again!

See, if you do it only once, or even twice.. Well it might have been a mistake. But 3 times?? Had to be on purpose. Probably something you rehearsed special and were just waiting for the right moment to show off. Rather than admit that maybe they just weren't cool enough to understand it, people are more likely to try and cover their butt and pretend they "got it". "Oh wow.. That was awesome. Wild stuff, man.."

Ok, you may figure that was joking, and it kinda was. But only kinda. When you're eplaying in front of people and you botch a note, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by just trying to work it in and acting like it was maybe one of the coolest little tricks from your private collection.

Always try to make it work or work it in. Never stop, since it will just draw more attention to it.

If your intonation on a note is a little off, yeah, correct it. But either do the correction very fast, or do it on the beat.

Now you might say "But I wasn't improvising". Well, there's a few thoughts to consider with that.

1.) (my personal favorite) You are NOW!

2.) Actually all playing contains improvisation to some degree. Even when you think you are playing strictly by the book, if you used some software to score what you play as you play it, you'd see that especially on the timing what you are playing is usually a lot more complex than the few dots on the score. To write out what you're actually doing would probably take dotted 128th notes/rests and all kinds of other bad craziness. Especially when it's sounding pretty good.

So I'd basically agree with Barry and Panda. But I'd especially agree with Grofica. Great quote/pic there, and words to live by.

(During practice is another matter. But you specifically were asking about performance, so the best thing to do in practice does not apply.)