Many moons ago (maybe 15 years), I first head the expression “street jazz” while talking with a fellow musician at a jam session. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Where else are you playing?

Other Musician, pulling on nose ring while enviously watching someone light a cigarette: Oh, I’m rehearsing a new band. We mostly jam at the house… You know, just run through changes and work on our chops. You should come over.

Me: Cool. What kind of stuff, bop?

Other Musician: Yeah, Real Book tunes, classic stuff.

Me: Where did you study, Denton? [as in the jazz program at the University of North Texas]

Other Musician: No, man, I play street jazz, not that academic stuff.

That’s how I remember first hearing the term “street jazz” but in retrospect I have always had one foot in the world of street jazz and one foot in the world of academic jazz. Simply put, academic jazz teaches through systematic procedures in a controlled environment, while street jazz forces you to pick up knowledge as best you can in a sink-or-swim environment.

Of course, like most cultures that are split into two different groups, each group thinks they are superior to the other. Academic jazz produces well-rounded musicians able to compete in the musical marketplace. Most studio musicians, musical directors and instructors have their advanced degree. Street jazz, however, arguably produces more creative, cutting-edge players and composers. They learn by imitation but also by asserting their individuality, trying to get noticed precisely because they don’t play it safe. They are more likely to make an original musical statement, be part of some new musical trend, while academic jazzers are more likely to preserve and promulgate older established jazz styles. A street player may not be as well-rounded as a schooled player, but may have developed and honed particular musical strengths.

The academic vs. street split is real, and yet both tracks are part of the greater jazz tradition. Jazz has always had this split; literate vs. oral tradition, schooled vs. self-taught musicians, and so on. One thing all jazz lovers can agree on is that the history of jazz reflects a complex and dynamic mix of musical influences. So for anyone to think that one method or tradition is superior to another in jazz is a shallow perspective that short-changes what jazz is all about.

So school jazz and street jazz are branches on the same tree. But if we look closer, we can see that they share some fundamental methods. For example, jazz can be taught from books, but only partly. Every player has to sit and listen to recordings. Back before 1918 if you wanted to learn jazz licks you had to go hang out where it was played. But since the Original Dixieland Jazz Band first recorded “Livery Stable Blues” recorded jazz has been an integral part of jazz pedagogy. The classic example is Charlie Parker woodshedding with Lester Young recordings, learning all of Prez’s licks from records, and incorporating them into his own style.

Working with recordings has become very systematic in the 21st century: All jazzers are familiar with the Jamie Aebersold playalong series (jazz music-minus-one recordings), which is now available on cassette, CD, CD-ROM, and whatever else the latest digital medium offers. Also, you can now get digital players that slow down recordings without changing the pitch, so you can learn difficult jazz solos more easily. My point is that the pedagogical methods of academic and street jazz are often the same, and involve a student sitting with recordings, working out melodies, patterns, harmonic progressions, and the like.

The main difference is in the playing. There is an old jazz aphorism which I heard paraphrased as “You can learn the elements, but you have to put them together yourself.” One of my teachers, pianist Roland Wiggins, put it this way: “First you learn the rules, then you supplant them.”

In other words, a jazz performance isn’t just a matter of taking what you have studied and playing it in front of people. You can do it that way, but something will be lacking. Academic jazzers run this risk more than street players. If you spend all your time in the classroom, doing your music in a controlled environment, your music may lack a certain vitality. I have seen many jazz groups with this problem. Their technique may be more consistent than a street player’s. They may have a wider range of knowledge. But their playing may be proficient without emotion, predictable, lacking edge and risk.

Worse still, they have trouble dealing with any unexpected phenomenon. A bad monitor mix, a noisy drunk near the stage, a broken guitar string, any of these things can cause a musical crisis, because the schooled players aren’t used to the butterfly effect, that chance and chaos are part of the musical performance, not something to be eliminated.

In this situation, the street player will have the advantage. He is so used to bad monitor mixes that a good one would surprise him. Noisy drunk? He can walk over to the table, tell the guy to “shut the $#@% up,” and never miss a beat of his solo. Broken guitar string? Well, you still have 5 left so what’s the problem?

In general, street jazz is just another term for real-world playing experience. But it is a little more than that. Jazz depends on people coming together in an ongoing community. Jazz styles can be dissected and analyzed, but they have an ineffable quality as well. What makes a New York player different from an L.A. player, from a New Orleans player, from a Texas player? There are specific stylistic things we can point to, but really it is the continuity of the community, the culture, in each regional style that comes through in the individual’s sound. So players reflect their community in their style of playing.

A player who studies in different communities will have deeper musical roots. Some of the greatest musical satisfaction I have known has come from my varied musical experiences, the fact that I have spent time in different musical communities, absorbed aspects of them, and made them part of my own individual style.

The school and the street not only can coexist, they can strengthen each other. I see individual players move between these two communities and become stronger musicians as a result. Both communities have their strengths and weaknesses, their chauvinisms and contradictions. But they are part of the larger jazz tradition, and the best jazz players and teachers not only know it, they live it.

Driving back from a gig in Dallas, I was talking with my bandmate, trumpeter Keith Fiala, about music (mostly to stay awake). We both teach a variety of students and we compared notes on a common problem: students rush, students are impatient, students don’t practice and then try to make up for it with adrenalin and luck.

I have noticed a disturbing trend among young music students: more and more of them seem to have ADD (attention deficit disorder). Many of my students use or have used ritalin or similar prescription drugs. Whether these drugs are necessary or are a product of an increasingly dysfunctional, pharmaceutical-dependent culture isn’t really the issue. The issue is that we live in a very distracting, disorienting, accelerated society. The pace of daily life has accelerated with each decade as technology and over-population continually re-shape our daily routines.

Imagine a child in the mid-19th century studying music. No television, no radio, no video games, no cars roaring by outside the window. Not that life was better back then, what with nightly beatings by alcoholic stepfathers, pesky polio epidemics, not to mention the lumpy breakfast gruel. But it was a slower-paced life. Imagine yourself sitting down to practice your clarinet (no saxophones available yet; Adolph Sax didn’t patent it until 1846). Just the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway, the cook pounding bread dough in the kitchen, the lovelorn chambermaid quietly weeping - but that’s another story).

Now compare that to the contemporary child’s environment. Is it any wonder that it is hard for a kid to concentrate these days? But it isn’t impossible. The first thing to remember is: S L O W D O W N.

On that long drive back to Austin, I told Keith that my martial arts background often helps in teaching music, not because I have to karate-chop my students into submission, but because the lessons one learns in the fighting arts are applicable to most areas of life, and to all the arts. Learning to concentrate, to be mentally and physically calm, to Slow Down, these are essential in the martial arts.

Any art is both an objective skill and a mirror for yourself. You sit there holding your clarinet, staring at the music on the stand in front of you, and you have to master the skills that allow you to play the music. This is objective reality. But in the process of mastering those skills, you learn about yourself.

You learn to control your breathing, to keep your posture erect, your back straight, your shoulders relaxed. You learn that mental anxiety, even a little bit, causes tightening of the muscles. You learn that your eyes can be distracted easily, and cause you to misread the music. You learn that if your attention loses focus you make mistakes, but that sometimes you can’t tell when your attention is wandering; you think you are focused on the music but you keep making mistakes. All kinds of stuff is going on subconsciously. This is frustrating, but it’s part of being human, and looking inward at all your bad habits, repressed fears and idiosyncracies, this is all part of mastering an art. The first step in this process is to Slow Down.

For example, you are trying to play a scale passage in a piece. It’s not that hard; you understand the rhythms, you understand that the phrase is based on a d-minor scale. And yet your fingers keep stumbling, hesitating. It shouldn’t be difficult and yet it is. Knowing this just increases your frustration, and causes your fingers to tighten and stumble even more. You want to tough it out. You think that if you keep repeating the phrase you will get it right. And yet it still feels uncomfortable. You play it right most of the time, but you still mess it up sometimes and this makes you tighten up every time you come to it.

There are many reasons this could be happening: Maybe the phrase is similar to another phrase you know, and subconsciously you confuse them. Maybe the way the phrase is written is subconsciously confusing (the spacing of the notes, a flyspeck on the page). You may never consciously figure out what causes the confusion. But if you acknowledge to yourself that your mind is working on different levels simultaneously, that your unconscious is constantly processing information, connecting sense stimuli to muscle memory, packaging this information and then sending it to the conscious mind, if you acknowledge all this, then maybe you can relax a little. Let yourself sort things out; slow down.

You can tell when the unconscious, subconscious, and conscious parts of your mind are working well together because things don’t seem as difficult. Things flow easier. Your body reacts naturally, you don’t have to remind yourself to relax your fingers or push the air from your diaphragm. Your eyes aren’t struggling to keep up with the music on the page. When this happens, when you feel in the zone, it is a great feeling. You feel like a musician (a fleeting sensation!) and you want this to be the normal state of affairs. But it won’t last, there is always something new, something changing, that will challenge you and throw you off balance.

My point here is that you can become familiar with this changing state. You get to know yourself better and better. You feel when you are in the zone, and when you are slipping out of it. You can learn to adapt, to adjust. This requires that you have two goals: Play the music, but also use the music as a mirror for learning about yourself. If you Slow Down, these two goals can be achieved together.

By Paul Klemperer

It is a simple idea that your mental state affects your actions. When you start a task, your mood, your attitude toward that task, and the various things floating around in your head, will all influence how you approach that task. Some tasks are ingrained habits, like brushing your teeth, or washing the dishes. Your biggest decision for a habitual task is just to do it; once the decision is made you can go on autopilot. Some tasks require constant concentration and an act of will to see the task through. These are more challenging, but also are the accomplishments that help you grow.

Music practice involves both approaches, habitual tasks and tasks requiring constant concentration. On a good day, practicing is fun, invigorating, and time seems to fly by. On a bad day, practicing is frustrating, exhausting, and time seems to creep by like an injured snail. That’s just the way it is, because your mental state goes through changes from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. Wouldn’t it be great if you could control your mental state all the time, just tell yourself to be happy, positive and full of energy, no matter what drudgery awaited you, no matter what problems you had to deal with? Some people are that way. They just take a deep breath, shrug off their worries, and greet the day with a smile. Those people can be very irritating for the rest of us.

But even if you can’t control your mental state, can’t just decide to be in a good mood, you can be aware of your mental state. You can accept who you are, and what is going on inside your head. You don’t have to avoid it, excuse it, or try to change it. But if you notice it, pay attention to it, you can understand it better, and this will actually make you a better musician. Here’s why: Your mental state is a complicated mixture of all your experiences. You carry your past around with you all the time, the distant past all the way to the very recent past. Your habits, hopes, fears, accomplishments and failures, are all hanging out in your head. These aren’t just things, facts, sitting there like old photographs or books you read one summer. They are actively part of you, and they affect how you play music. In a sense they are your team, your scout troop, your ragtag band of misfit commandos, and you are the group leader.

So while it is a simple idea that your mental state affects your actions, it is not so simple to understand the many components of your mental state, and how they combine to influence the tasks that your body carries out in the physical realm. But it helps if you think of all the parts of you as a team: Your body, your mind, your reflexes, your memories, all these things come together in the act of making music, in the moment when sound replaces silence.

This self-awareness doesn’t have to be a complicated process. It exists in the moment, and it is a matter of just paying attention to yourself. Always remember that the goal, the task, is just to play music. The goal isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to “do it right.” And the goal certainly isn’t to be like anyone else. Just try to play the music, and notice what your team is doing when that happens. Paying attention to yourself, your mental state as you practice music, can lead to better musicianship and maybe even more self-awareness in other parts of your life.

Here are a few examples I have found in my own practice habits and those of my students:

Fumbling Fingers. You try to play a particular phrase of written music and your fingers keep missing the notes. It’s not that hard, you understand the music, you should be able to do it, and yet you keep fumbling. Stupid fingers! Why won’t you play it right?!

Obviously, there is a breakdown in the line of communication from eyes to brain to fingers. Your fingers are notifying you of this snafu. Don’t get angry at your fingers; they are just telling you that they aren’t getting the information they need. Is the information coming too fast, is it garbled?

The first thing I do in this kind of situation is to slow down. If you are playing a new phrase, your fingers may not have developed the muscle memory for that phrase. Find the tempo where your fingers can play the phrase in a relaxed way, without tension. Why were you playing the phrase faster than this? Maybe that’s how you heard it, maybe you thought “that’s how it is supposed to go.” Try hearing it at the slower tempo where your fingers can play it. Get your ear, mind and fingers working as a team. Keep track of that smooth synchronized feeling when the team works together. Then you can gradually increase the tempo without losing that feeling. Gradually this concentration will move into the area of habit.

The problem may not just be about muscle memory. One of my students tends to be ruled by his ear. He plays what his ear remembers, even if it is not written on the page. His fingers fumble because they are being told one thing by the eye and another by the ear. What comes out is a garbled mixture of both. For a long time he didn’t know why his fingers fumbled. He thought the music was too difficult for him, but really he was trying to play two different things at the same time. I had him play the phrase with his eyes closed, and it came out perfectly, the way his ear remembered it. Then I had him play it slowly from the written part and he could play that version as well. He realized that when he tried to play the part at tempo, his eyes would lag behind and his ears would take over. The team would stop working together and chaos ensued. Once he consciously realized this, it was easier for his ears to hear both versions and to choose the written version, coordinating with his eyes.

Another student tends to be ruled by his eyes, and his eyes wander. Whatever he sees, he tends to play, even if it’s an ant walking across the top of the page. Rationally, he knows that the ant isn’t part of the music, yet his eyes tell his brain to focus on the ant, his brain tells his fingers “Play ant!” and his fingers fumble around looking for the ant button on the clarinet (there are so many buttons and holes, one of ‘em must be the ant button). Why do his eyes do this? Why do they sabotage the team?

When he tries to force his eyes to focus on the notes, he is prone to more mistakes, not less. His eyes can’t let go of that ant (or whatever distraction is on the page; a smudge, a chord symbol above the staff, an irregular space caused by the music notation software). But if he stops, takes the time to consciously examine whatever is distracting him, understand why it is there, then he can move on, and play the music. Sometimes, if you just acknowledge that something is distracting you, it will stop distracting you.

It really does help to think of yourself as a group leader. As individuals we think we should have it together, that we function as rational beings. But there is always a bunch of stuff going on inside us, and rational, focused and efficient action is often more of a dream than a reality. You have to start with where you are at and build from there. Yelling at yourself, setting unrealistic goals, doesn’t help. You can achieve your goals, but you can’t rush towards them.

If you take this approach with yourself, leading the team of body and mind as you practice, you will become a better leader when you play with others. There are definite correlations between the way an individual approaches music and the way a group of musicians approaches music. Both respond to the demands music places on them. If you are sensitive to what is going on within yourself when you practice, you will learn a lot more than you may at first realize.