Jess Green likes to remind herself, on a regular basis, of what a high school teacher once told her. It was at the end of Year 12, and she was trying to decide whether or not to audition at a music school.
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"You've just got to do it because you must do it," she remembers him telling her.
Actually, she's double-quoting; it was really her own grandmother, the poet and literary critic Dorothy Green, who gave her the words to stick by.
"She wrote something in one of her books along the lines of, 'You do it because you must'," Green says.
As a jobbing jazz musician in a time when such a thing is barely even recognised by her own alma mater, the Australian National University School of Music, it's a mantra she finds herself repeating often.
We're talking over peppermint tea at the Cupping Room, a stone's throw from the School of Music, where she teaches guitar on Mondays. Green has only recently returned to Canberra, where she grew up, finished school, graduated from the School of Music and finally bid farewell, shortly after flying home from a few years overseas, glancing down as her aeroplane banked to land in the capital, and wondering, idly, why the flight had been diverted to Queanbeyan. That was more than a decade ago.
In the interim, she has worked as a freelance musician in jazz, blues, afrobeat and indie rock, taught, toured, performed, recorded albums, played in bands, married and had a child. It's largely this last achievement that has brought her home. Craving trees and an on-hand grandma for her daughter, she and her husband, a painter, have returned to a much-changed city.
The place is peppered with cool coffee spots like the Cupping Room, there are good shows on, a thriving arts scene. But the School of Music is, she says, almost unrecognisable as the place at which she spent four years studying, at the end of the 1990s. Back then, the Jazz Department was located in what is now the Manuka Arts Centre, next to the Manuka Pool.
"It was great - we should have stayed there, because they gave us this massive building," she says.
"All you need is good teachers. [Now] it's still going, it's just that it's like they've cut half of its legs off."
She admits, though, to having something of a biased perspective from the "jazz campus, because all along, we've been this sort of add-on".
But isn't that the reality of jazz as a rule? The famously outer-edge genre that changes the rules every 10 years, and yet attracts virulent purists who frown upon on the slightest deviation? Improvised, under strict conditions? It's a vexing netherworld of contradictions with which Green has long made her peace.
She wasn't always going to be a jazz musician, although she loved singing from an early age. As a teenager in the 90s, she went through the obligatory grunge phase before working her way back through experimental music and "all the cool stuff that happened in the 70s where art and music was the same thing". She listened to David Byrne and Patti Smith and Kraftwerk.
But by the time she finished Year 12 at Narrabundah College, she had got into the School of Music, where she studied jazz guitar. At that stage, she had stopped singing.
"I think there were two reasons. One, I did feel I needed to focus. Studying jazz guitar was a tough thing to do," she says.
"And also, I suppose, in hindsight I feel a bit like I was influenced by a bit of prejudice, because it's a double-edged sword. Being a girl - especially at that school… there was a negative tone about being a vocalist, and I think that might have come from some stereotypes and I think also misogyny. And it just wasn't as cool as playing guitar."
Put simply, she wanted to be taken seriously, and to hold her weight in an ensemble. In time, once she had travelled, seen a bit of the world and moved to Sydney, she would learn that these misgivings were partly a jazz-world construct, partly in her head.
But in the meantime, she headed to Europe, and then to West Africa, where she worked for three months in Togo, trading English classes for music lessons. It was a short time in the scheme of things, but long enough to change her life.
She had grown up listening to her parents' Paul Simon records, and says the singer instilled in her a fascination with Africa, where real jazz has its roots. That, and reading The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. The connections continued throughout her studies.
"When studying… we were very encouraged to appreciate the connections between West Africa and jazz and blues. It's really, really important," she says.
"You could summarise it by saying X million slaves were removed and taken to New Orleans and all through the Americas… The rhythms that you hear in jazz are directly traceable back to West African rhythms."
She was in her mid-20s when she returned to Canberra a changed person – and moved to Sydney two weeks later. Her return, some years down the track, is a well-worn route for many an artist who has found the bright lights of Sydney distracting. But it was a difficult move.
"My reckoning with myself about being able to leave Sydney was that I was going to focus more on my own music, and focus more on one project," she says.
That project is Pheno – a new stage-name and a new creative space, to complement her move to a new physical setting. And it's not jazz. "I'm calling it Afro-Sci," she says. "Rhythms and melodies from Africa with electric guitars and synths."
She takes the explanation further on the crowd-funding website Pozible, where she recently raised more than $9000 to record her first EP, which she'll begin work on next month.
"I wanted to give myself new creative space to perform this music and a license to try new things, so I have followed in the footsteps of some of my musical heroes and dreamed up a new name. Phonetically, Pheno (pronounced 'feeno') sounds good to me, and it has some great connotations, it can be short for 'phenomenon', and for me it conjures up mystery with a sort of sci-fi element which I hope you'll hear coming through the music."
And she's the first to admit that, for those who know her as a jazz musician, it sounds kind of, well, pop-esque.
But she's adamant that, like jazz itself, her love for the genre will never die. It's burned into her psyche, even while she's busy exploring the world she thought she'd left behind after high school.
"I'll play jazz forever and continue to develop my skills as a performer and composer, and of course it will influence my pop and rock writing," she says.
"And a love for improvisation! Nothing is more exciting than making music in the moment right there and having a sophisticated musical conversation with your fellow band members, whilst drawing on the audience's energy."
Pheno is just one of her new Canberra projects; aside from her 30-odd guitar students (two of whom she teaches as a fellow at the School of Music), she's running a pilot course, alongside trumpeter Miroslav Bukovsky, to encourage more women to play jazz, in what has long been a male-dominated environment. It's an initiative dreamed up 14 years ago by Australian jazz great Sandy Evans, who figured the best way to get girls into jazz was to get them hooked in high school.
Funded by the Sydney Improvised Music Association, the course runs for eight weeks and ends in a concert. Green's girls – a mix of 14-year-old novices and seasoned music students - are just two weeks away from their big show.
Seeing girls gradually loosen up from the stage fright and performance anxiety she knows so well from her own early years, Green says it's a buzz that never grows old.
"Jazz is freedom!" she says. "It's the music that came from oppression and delivered people from that and it can deliver people today. That's what I want the girls to feel."
But what can she tell them, when it comes to making the end-of-school, crossroads decision? It's a tough road, to be honest.
When the ANU released a discussion paper on the School of Music consultations in May, Green was beyond frustrated. She had put in her own submission, in which she had listed the vast range of jobs the school's alumni had performed in the years since graduating.
"I'd included this massive list of high-profile jobs that Canberra jazz alumni had - they're working in the Opera House, they work in writing music for Happy Feet, working at every major high-profile stage in the country, and internationally," she says.
"[They're] playing with Lior, with Paul Kelly, with the Sydney Symphony.
"If you study jazz it teaches you to have excellent time skills, to train your ear, to learn to be part of an ensemble, to be inventive, to be yourself. That's why Canberra jazz graduates work with everyone from Gurrimil, to James Morrison to Faker. They play stages all over the world including all our prestigious art institutions, and they win ARIAS."
But she says it seems her long list was ignored.
"[The paper] used all this terminology regarding symphonies and classical music. Yeah, it is really hard to get a job in a symphony. Guess what, there's five jobs in Australia," she says.
"That's true, but what about the people like me who every week are playing with a different band, touring to Sweden one week and Woodford Folk Festival the next week?"
It is, she says, an exhausting lifestyle, with no sick pay, no super, and no prospect of earning much above $70,000 a year, even with 80-hour weeks.
"Some days, I really would say get a great day job, but it's really hard to be good when you do that," she says.
"There's so many days when you think to yourself, why am I doing this? It's a horrendous thing to do to yourself."
And then, she remembers the words of her grandmother.
You do it because you must.
It's those words that have kept her going all these years, and that will hopefully inspire a coterie of budding jazz musicians onstage next weekend.
The 2016 Young Women's Jazz Workshops Concert is on Sunday September 18 at the Street Theatre. For bookings, visit thestreet.org.au. For information about the workshops, visit sima.org.au.
