Perusing Howie Smith's musical résumé - work with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Jazz Unit, Australia's Jazz Co-op, along with numerous other classical and jazz associations and composing credits - it's tempting to slice this multi-instrumentalist and Cleveland State University professor into distinct parts: the classical and the jazz; the teacher and the artist; the practical and the fun. But ask Smith about the divide, and it's clear he'd prefer to keep the coin spinning.

"It's always been what it is," Smith says, laughing off any attempt to pin down his musical character. He learned a deceptively simple lesson early on - "music is sound." It takes many musicians years, he says, to distill that from their formal educations.

Smith's first steps in music were anything but orthodox. Starting at age 5, when his preschool stature limited him to a small, curved soprano saxophone, his teacher already had him playing by ear, improvising and composing.

Smith says that active approach to musical development set him on a path to creation. Performance and composition are interrelated for him, which isn't to say different settings don't present distinct challenges.

"It's sort of like a different language," Smith says of working in different settings.

The language of jazz, to Smith's thinking, requires an important ingredient: attitude.

"A large percentage of anything that comes out of your musical instrument is based on attitude," he says. "It's like an athlete that performs well or doesn't perform well. A lot of them develop the physical skills, but then it's what goes on mentally as you're playing the game. It's what's happening mentally as you're playing the piece that's gonna make it work or not."

Students of his jazz appreciation and jazz improv classes have had this drubbed into them over the years. Each course begins with a Charlie Parker story that, like many Bird tales, links the sax god as much with Paul Bunyan as with Dizzy Gillespie.

As Smith tells it, a saxophone player once cornered Parker in New York and asked what he had to do to play like Parker did. "Bird said, "Master the instrument, master the music, forget all that - just play.'"

"It's just like speaking," Smith says. "What you want to do is get up and tell a story. And you want to really feel that story. When you go out on stage, the last thing you want to think about is what's happening with the instrument and what you need to do with the music."

Smith has always surrounded himself with excellent musicians, composing pieces based on the personnel involved.

"I'm a real project-oriented person," he explains. "I find it difficult to sit down and write anything if I don't know who's going to play it and when it's going to be played."

That should present no problems for Saturday's show at Nighttown, where keyboardist David Thomas and drummer Bill Ransom will join him. Both are former CSU students who have played with Smith off and on over the years. But that's not to say it'll be old hat.

For starters, Smith insisted that Thomas play only the Hammond B3, a condition that should root the trio in a heady Jimmy Smith or Larry Young '60s groove. How that will fit with the group's book, which Smith says augments jazz standards with tunes from the likes of the Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson, is anyone's guess. And that spark of uncertainty is probably much of the point.

"I've never trusted anybody without a sense of humor - musicians as well," laughs Smith who, in his annual CSU Concert in Progress, has featured everything from a piece for 60 saxophonists to improvising alongside Plain Dealer critic Wilma Salisbury as she read her review of the show. He abandoned the idea of playing before a video of synchronized swimmers - the live music set to be different, of course, from that which the swimmers had choreographed their moves to.

"It's fun," Smith says. "I like that thing that comes at you in a different way."

Howie Smith/David Thomas/Bill Ransom Organ Ism Trio: 8 p.m. Saturday, July 12 at Nighttown, 12387 Cedar Rd., 216.795.0550. Tickets: $10.

Deborah Van Kleef
Work in Progress (TSM Records)

If you've ever been to a local peace rally, folk festival, or anywhere else that songs of social justice and protest are being sung, chances are you've heard Deborah Van Kleef's earnest, honest voice rising above the rabble. After years of toting her guitar around the area, wearing her left-leaning politics proudly on her sleeve, she's finally come out with her first CD. It boasts a nice blend of heartbreak and wry humor, righteous anger and playful goofiness. It includes several of Van Kleef's finely crafted original songs, as well as material by Woody Guthrie, Malvina Reynolds, A.P. Carter and others. She shows herself to be an agile wordsmith with a slicing wit on "Talking Health Care," a talking blues in which she takes on the greed inherent in the American health-care system. Perhaps her biggest hit is "The Great Fast Food Strike," an updating of the 19th century ballad "The Buffalo Skinners," this time telling the story of McDonald's workers in Macedonia, Ohio and their 1998 strike for better treatment. The song caught the ear of Pete Seeger, who sang it at Carnegie Hall that same year. She puts together an ambitious train trilogy in which she segues from Woody Guthrie's "Little Black Train" to the late Cuyahoga County poet laureate Daniel Thompson's inspirational poem "Train!" to James Keelaghan's "Never Gonna Stop This Train." Ken Whiteley's production is clean and colorful, with guitar, bass, fiddle, washboard and "guitjo," among other sounds. The package is attractive, with some beautiful black-and-white photographs of industrial Cleveland. Fans of Malvina Reynolds, Peggy Seeger and Hazel Dickens will find much to enjoy here. - Peggy Latkovich

Deborah Van Kleef performs at 6 p.m. Saturday, July 12 at Loganberry Books (13015 Larchmere Blvd., 216.795.9800).