Thoughts On Cultivating Personal Style
Jazz: A Study In Style
Jazz, as a musical art form, is all about style. A Jazz musician would not try to reproduce a piece of music in the exact same way that another musician would do. It would be fine to copy a style for practice, or as a musical reference to another musician as a sign of respect or an inside joke, but never to give off the impression of the other musician’s style being their own. Why? Because there is an implicit assumption in Jazz that celebrating individuality keeps the genre alive, full of ideas, dynamic and interesting.
Most of us — myself included — are not Jazz musicians. But the emphasis on style in Jazz is something we can take inspiration from in how we show up on our own life’s stage. Every day, we have the opportunity to add a touch of style to the things that we do. A life sprinkled with style adds richness to our lived experience. When we combine substance in what we do and style in how we do it, we attain Poise. A lesser acknowledged second-order effect of a life of style is that we begin to appreciate other people’s uniqueness too because we know what it’s like to cultivate our own.
The video below is of Dorothy Donegan, considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, performing the classic Jazz Standard Georgia On My Mind. Donegan is a perfect example of a musician who oozes style. Every note overflows with expression.
Georgia by Dorothy Donegan
It’s Not About Buying Things
Style is about what’s on the inside. Consumerist culture teaches us that the resources necessary to express ourselves are found somewhere outside of us. We are conditioned to undervalue ourselves and we compensate for this feeling by buying things to cover up our insecurities or to grossly magnify our strengths. It’s fine to buy things to amplify our style in the world. But the style needs to be there in the first place. We already have all of the raw materials of style within us. We don’t need to buy things. To illustrate this, allow me to highlight actions that we all do each and every day, but which usually evade our conscious mind.
- We all have to breathe in and out to survive
- We all have to balance our bodies while sitting or walking
- We all have to form sounds in our mouths to speak
- We all have to choose which words to say
- We all have to move our facial muscles to express our emotion
What if we decided to infuse these mundane and ordinary actions with a greater sense of who we are? A greater sense of our values and intentions? It would impact the way we do everything.
Beautiful Constraints
Although we have considerable freedom in deciding how to undertake the tasks of life, I acknowledge we are never completely free in deciding how we do things. Messy reality always gets in the way, for example;
- Not everyone has the same level of physical mobility or hearing
- Our culture(s) determines the language we speak and therefore the sounds we perceive as natural and the words that should go together
- There are social norms regarding the types of emotions that are acceptable to share in public
But rather than work against our freedom of style, the constraints that reality imposes on us force us to become more creative in how we express ourselves. In this way, the constraints of life give our stylistic choices more meaning. Style and constraints co-evolve and shape one another in the infinite game of life. And that still leaves a lot of room for self-expression — to improvise, initiate and respond to life with style. Think of who invented Jazz in the first place — African Americans living under unspeakable social and economic constraints. And yet the music they invented continues to be played and reinterpreted by all peoples in almost every corner of the globe.
The track in the video below is the same Jazz standard as the initial video. But this time, it is performed by an Acapella group during the Covid-19 lockdown. I love how this constraint forced the musicians, composer and videographer to get even more creative than they would have done otherwise.
