School by day, jazz at night

I've always been interested in the day jobs of jazz musicians, be they university professors, full-time private teachers or designers and illustrators. Last weekend, I met a pianist who I had seen perform at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival while I was going to school out in Idaho. She's an accompanist and music teacher at a local arts high school, and I had known she lived around here, but I hadn't had a chance to talk with her.

We chatted about how the Idaho festival has changed and how some festival mainstays (including Russell Malone, who performed in Atlanta during this year's Emory Jazz Festival) weren't on the schedule this year. Eventually, we started talking about performing while maintaining a full-time job. Her conflict, she said, was not that there weren't enough places to perform, but that after working all day long, she didn't have the energy to search out gigs at night.

I'll be thinking about the many lives of jazz musicians on Friday at Steve Dancz's Jazz at the High performance. In addition to being a composer and a performer, Dancz is the head of the Jazz Studies program at Georgia State University. He'll be playing with his sextet, which features alto saxophonist Dub Hudson, tenor Rick Bell, drummer John Lewis, bassist Carl Lindberg and percussionist Kofi McDonald. I've never heard an ensemble of this size in the High's atrium; it should be interesting. GSU student David Engelhard performs with his quintet from 10-midnight. Friday; 5 p.m. $18.