Years ago, I was one of the judges of a saxophone competition at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) located in Mexico City.
Everyone was very talented. But one thing I tried to stress to all of the contestants was that jazz competitions were slightly different from classical music ones.
In classical music, it's not so much about navigating your way through a set of chord changes and idiomatic authenticity, as it is about instrumental command and your ability to interpret the piece with the composer's intent. The person with the weakest technique will never win a classical music competition; whereas, in jazz competitions, accuracy is rarely your competitive edge.
This is a generalization of both, but you get my point.
When offering the students advice at the end of each of their performances, the one thing I told them all was to be themselves. I explained that at my age and level of experience I've heard the saxophone played as fast as humanly possible; I've heard saxophonists who could play louder than trumpet players; I've heard skillfully executed chord change playing; and I've heard musicians that could effortlessly weave in and out of the vocabularies of different players. But the one thing I haven't heard...is them. Allowing me to hear them would be the most impressive thing they could do at that moment. It seemed to resonate with them. And many of them seemed to take it to heart.
Since that day, my Be Yourself spiel has grown into a five-line mantra. It goes something like this:
BE YOURSELF
Someone will ALWAYS have more technique than you. So BE YOURSELF.
Someone will ALWAYS have a better and bigger sound than you. So BE YOURSELF.
Someone will ALWAYS be able to play more stuff than you. So BE YOURSELF.
Someone will ALWAYS have more talent than you. So BE YOURSELF.
But NO ONE will EVER be able to BE YOU better than YOU. So BE YOURSELF.
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