By: Sarah Summer
If you have ever found truth in a melody or motivation in a solo, Jazz Smart might feel like coming home. In this thoughtful, compact book, multidisciplinary artist and designer Lior Zelering collects 45 quotes from the greats of jazz, including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Allan Holdsworth, and Charlie Parker, and uses them to explore what music can teach us about life, art, and creative courage.
“Jazz is more than just music; it’s a way of life,” Zelering writes in the book’s description. That one line sums up his mission: to show how the instincts that make great music, such as listening, improvising, and taking risks, are the same instincts that fuel creativity in every field.
Zelering is not a music historian or critic. He is a Nova Scotia-based artist, designer, and educator whose work bridges pop culture, design theory, and digital storytelling. As the founder and instructor at Masters Design Lab, an accredited international design school, he has spent years teaching creators how to think in rhythm and pattern, the same kind of awareness that drives jazz.
When Music Becomes Mindset
Jazz Smart: Words of Wisdom About Art and Life from Jazz Giants is not a technical guide or an essay collection. It is more like a conversation. Each page pairs a quote with a reflection and space to breathe, allowing the reader to feel the rhythm of thought.
Zelering’s curatorial touch is clear. He selects lines that reveal the connection between sound and awareness, the way Coltrane’s discipline mirrors a designer’s process, or how Miles Davis’s use of silence mirrors a visual artist’s restraint. The result is a book that asks creators to stop filling every moment and start listening again.
In his own words, jazz teaches us “to delve deep, improvise, take risks, and truly listen.” That principle becomes the thread running through the book and through Zelering’s larger body of work.
From the Studio to the Page
Before writing Jazz Smart, Zelering built a career around exploring contrasts such as analog versus digital, structure versus chaos, and humor versus critique. His visual art combines collage, texture, typography, and political commentary, drawing inspiration from pop culture, punk music, and street art.
That same energy hums beneath this book. Reading it feels like watching his visual style come to life in words. Texture becomes tone. Composition becomes cadence. Each quote lands like a note, concise, resonant, and placed with purpose.
Zelering says his work reflects “the current social mindset, providing a critical perspective on all sides of politics and human interest.” In Jazz Smart, he applies that same sensibility to creativity itself, showing how the premier ideas often emerge from tension, not control.
Why Jazz Smart Belongs on Your Shelf
In an era when algorithms dictate what we see and hear, Jazz Smart is refreshingly human. It is a reminder that creativity is not about perfection or productivity. It is about awareness.
The book does not tell you what to do. It invites you to stop, listen, and pay attention. Zelering uses music’s language to discuss design, and design’s discipline to discuss life. It is the kind of slim, quietly powerful book that belongs beside your sketchbook, notebook, or instrument case.
Whether you are an artist, musician, writer, or simply someone looking for perspective, Jazz Smart reads like a deep breath in the middle of digital noise.
A Book to Keep Close
Jazz Smart is not a book you finish and forget. It is a companion, something to pick up when you need a spark or a reset. It belongs in studios, classrooms, and offices, anywhere people are trying to make something new.
Each page feels like part of an ongoing composition, reminding readers that creativity is a practice, not a performance. Zelering leaves us with a message that resonates far beyond music — that listening deeply, in art and in life, is where all great ideas begin.
Links:
- Book Available on Amazon
- Know more about Lior at his Professional site
