This paper explores the improviser’s mindset as a shared conceptual and practical foundation across music therapy and music education, and the affordances of praxial music education concepts as a potential improvisatory framework for planning and facilitating music therapy and music education programs. Drawing on over three decades of personal and professional dialogue between the authors (a music therapist and a music educator), we present an interdisciplinary narrative grounded in jazz improvisation, reflective practice, and relational approaches to musicking. Framed as a dialogue between therapeutic and educational approaches, we introduce the improviser’s mindset as a framework for reflective, adaptive, and relational practice, with reasoning, improvisational decision-making, and reflective practice at the centre.We examine how principles of praxial music education, particularly curriculum development and the role of the teacher as an improviser, might inform a praxial approach to music therapy and how insights from music therapy might expand reflective music education practice. This paper includes an exploration of improvised decision-making within sessions; a discussion of reflective practice to enhance therapeutic and educational methods; and key concepts and techniques of praxial improvisation in sessions, with planning, facilitating, and evaluating addressed through a dialogic structure.This work contributes to scholarship on interdisciplinary collaboration and aims to foster dialogue between praxial, improvisatory music educators and music therapists. We argue that the improviser’s mindset offers a generative approach to planning and facilitating programs and sessions, supports moment-to-moment decision-making, and positions improvisation not only as a musical method but as a mode of inquiry, pedagogy, andragogy, and care. Through this interdisciplinary dialogue, we present reflective practice and relational musicking as a basis for educational integration and therapeutic methods, and propose that a praxial, improvisatory stance can inform curriculum development, the role of the teacher as an improviser, and a praxial approach to music therapy.