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.

Okay, the Dubai ports deal has come and gone. There are always the flash-in-the-pan sensational news stories that get a lot of short-term reaction, and then fade into our messy stack of cultural clippings. But there are often underlying threads of continuity which linger, subterranean roots which link all the short-lived issues when they push their weedy blooms through the cracked asphalt of the American landscape.

GWB back-pedalled on the Dubai deal after his Republican base rebelled in a disturbing mix of critical awareness and racist jingoism. Was the issue that American companies should run security on American soil, or that we should look more closely at how global corporate culture controls the business of security? For the Prez and the rest of the suits who run things the easy answer was, of course, to assuage/massage the masses by saying “Foreigners won’t control security in the U.S.”

GWB (I use these initials to signify his corporate persona, as opposed to his folksy individual, brush-cutting, language-mangling, head-bobbing persona) and the corporate elite proceeded on the premise that as long as the security companies in question aren’t technically on U.S. soil, then they don’t have to be American. Thus, a few weeks after the Dubai brouhaha, a Hong Kong company was awarded a similar security contract, based off the U.S. mainland in the Bahamas. Now that’s some quality political nitpicking. Some news analysts (cable news yelling heads Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews for example) pointed out that it was no different than the Dubai deal, but it seems to have stirred little reaction in Congress, because technically them furriners ain’t controllin’ Amurrika.

It’s pretty clear that the parties involved are playing a shell game with the American public: You want American companies to control security in the U.S.? Okay, we’ll give you an American company, even if it’s merely a subsidiary of a larger foreign company. That way everybody is a winner. Americans can feel more secure and the global economy can proceed as usual.

It seems to me that what took the Bush administration by surprise was the jingoistic outrage the Dubai fiasco triggered. For GWB there is no contradiction between simple-minded American patriotism, cheerleading slogans laced with national and religious pride, and the larger reality of global corporate culture. In GWB’s corporate reality, trans-national corporations are as natural a part of the landscape as highways, oil fields, and strip malls. He knows that in the big corporate picture distinctions between Dubai, Hong Kong, the Bahamas and the U.S. are mere details. The important thing is business, productivity, efficiency and profitability. What’s good for General Motors is good for America, and in this case General Motors is the same as Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation, at least in GWB’s mind.

So, the Bush administration (and presumably other governments watching our nationalistic antics) learned a lesson: slap a coat of American paint over the trans-national conglomerates. It won’t change the underlying economic reality, but it will make the citizenry more comfortable in their nationalistic bubble.

In a society increasingly defined by war, security is the 500-lb gorilla in our livingroom. GWB paternalistically exhorts us to be alert but keep living normally. Go out and buy things, keep the economy rolling; our lavish consumer culture is the envy of the world and reflects the best that Western-style democracy has to offer. Meanwhile, the government is trying to catch up with the huge task of securing the centralized, technologically complex national infrastructure. Today the issue is port security. Yesterday it was airport security. Tomorrow it will be mass transit stations, nuclear power stations, mega-shopping malls, and so on. Any place of importance to the American economy is a security concern.

We are supposed to go on about our business in a peace economy, at the same time as GWB guides us further and further into a growing war economy. What a paradox, what a surreal science fiction world we are sliding towards! In the near future will there be security checkpoints and military response teams stationed at the entrance to every Wall-Mart and Home Depot? Will there be x-ray machines and bomb-sniffing dogs at every bus stop? That seems to be the end result for GWB’s catch-up strategy of Homeland Security.

And the really science fiction aspect of it all is that GWB’s concern isn’t what kind of society we will be living in, what a monumental waste of resources this kind of society will require. His concern is which private companies will be awarded the security contracts. In his worldview war-profiteering companies like Halliburton, KGB, Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation, are the logical recipients of such contracts, because they have the experience, the ability to step immediately into a war economy. After all, most of them have been doing this kind of business since the early days of the Vietnam War.

Am I exaggerating the situation? I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories as a rule, but it does seem like GWB’s view of America is a corporate cat-rat farm: Create the conditions for war-profiteering, then facilitate the growth of war-profiteering companies, which encourage the further spread of war, which creates the conditions for more war-profiteering… Just go back to President Eisenhower’s 1961 speech and you can see the roots of this view of America: (http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html).

One more example: The NY Times reports that gun sales in Iraq have soared, and prices have more than doubled. Hot selling items are American-made weapons and Russian AK-47s. Good news for gun manufacturers!