Personally, I've found one of the more stimulating ways of playing in recent times has been to kind of move outside the free improvised area and work with people who are probably improvisers but they have a particular way of working.
“If you play jazz, then you play with your fingers. If you're playing rock, you use a pick. There's really no rhyme or reason to that other than that's just the way it has been.”
“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”