A Lifetime Spent Listening To Jazz Music Informs How We Conduct Our YMCA Youth Basketball Practice
Jonathan Dunnemann
Basketball is more than a game: It's a path to balance, excellence, and transcendent personal peace.
It is not a stretch to say, that I have been listening to jazz music nearly all my life. I have my grandfather to thank for that leaning. He always played WNEW 1130 AM "The Worlds Greatest Radio Station", on the radio at his Barbershop in Montclair, New Jersey until he could no longer work.
Grandpa's most popular styles were swing, bebop, post-bop, and soul jazz. He always liked music with solid lyrics that told a familiar story, was romantic, had an uptempo, and was easy for couples to dance to. I now own his record collection, which includes artists Abbey Lincoln, Art Blakey, Art Tatum, Billy Eckstine, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Hank Mobley, Johnny Hartman, Louis Armstrong, Mary Lou Williams, Nina Simone, Ornette Coleman, Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, and many others.
As a junior at Clifford J. Scott High School many years ago, I recall our varsity basketball team captain, John Moore, requesting permission from Head Coach Thomas King to play the WAR album, The World Is A Ghetto, during our practice before an upcoming contest against the then highly-ranked and quite imposing East Orange High School Panthers. We were defeated, but I do not doubt that listening to the music earlier in the day by one of the funkiest bands ever helped our team 'get pumped' to play at a high level.
In college, I listened to progressive and contemporary jazz, Latin jazz, and jazz fusion in the company of two of my closest upperclassmen friends. They shared their appreciation for a wide range of artists with me; Al Jarreau, Astrud Gilberto, George Benson, Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver, Jean-Luc Ponty, Keith Jarrett, Kenny Barron, Lonnie Liston Smith, Return to Forever, Roy Ayers, Stan Getz, Stanley Turrentine, The Crusaders, Weather Report, and Wes Montgomery to name a few. I also began playing WICN Radio 90.5FM at the end of the day in my Holy Cross College dorm room.
Throughout adulthood, the more jazz music I consumed the more it became a kind of background prop for moments of contemplation, meditation, or relaxation. This aided me in overcoming feelings of anxiety, depression, and mental blockage. On other occasions, my brainstorming, physical workouts, and spiritual insights were enhanced through the rhythmic experience of a jazz song. For all of these reasons, I will be including music, especially jazz, as part of my youth basketball coaching practice with youths. I hope that youths will be better able to let go of whatever they may have faced earlier in their day so that they will be less emotionally and mentally encumbered or self-conscious about how they perform in practice, the outcome of a scrimmage or game, and more likely to have a Ludwig van Beethoven (Brain Scans of Jazz Musicians Reveal How to Reach a Creative ‘Flow State’) moment that effortlessly moves them far away from mind wandering and closer to the flow state or the experience of being "in the zone" and gaining a greater sense of fulfillment.
Many athletes use music in purposeful ways when they train and even during sporting events. Athletes reported that they experienced positive affective states such s alertness, relaxation, happiness and confidence (Laukka and Quick, 2011).
Since the late 1990s, music has been indicated to affect one's ability to achieve a 'flow state.' However, it depends also on selecting the right music for the exercise and the person in question (Relationship between music genre and the 'flow state' during training amongst gym-goers)."
Many gym-goers listen to music when they train and many of them have a preference for different playlists during warm-ups and training (Ong, 2023)."
Following some preliminary investigation, I have discovered that 'binaural beats' are used by creatives worldwide to induce the flow state. Therefore, I intend to identify, sample, and begin integrating this type of music into our twice a week YMCA Basketball Program practices and to later gather feedback from our youth participants at the end of the school year about how their listening experience made them feel.
Flow, characterized as a state of optimal functioning, allows a person to transcend one's average and usual skill level to fully realize one's potential. Flow also impacts the acquisition of new skills and the improvement of skills (Philippe, Singer, Jaeger, Biasutti, & Sinnett, 2022).
It is also important to mention, "...research has shown that appropriate practice generates a certain control over the emergence of flow in athletes or musicians. Factors such as being focused and convinced that nothing is more important than the experience in question, having the right skills for the demands of the task, and being able to direct one's attention to the task at hand during the activity are some conditions that must be fulfilled to experience flow (Achieving Flow: An Exploratory Investigation of Elite College Athletes and Musicians)."
So here is the first take at what will be an ever-expanding playlist of Binaural recordings:
JVC BN-5 . Binaural Biphonic H4 . Sony BDP-S790 . Five Peace Band Live . Chick Corea John McLaughlin
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Other inventive and transcendent melodic house & techno music, progressive and contemporary jazz, jazz fusion, and spiritual (astral) jazz recordings include:
Stay tuned for more on the subject of flow, spiritual jazz, and basketball in the future!
Coach Jon
My six years of cybersecurity experience, along with over 10 years of experience as an Excel VBA programmer, enable me to deploy creative solutions to cybersecurity business challenges.
7 个月This an interesting and enjoyable read. I just saw EWF last Friday and I thought you would have enjoyed them.