Juraj Kalász (1963) has spent most of his adult life trying to decide whether he is a bassist, an engineer, a journalist, an author or a manager. So far, the jury is still out. After studying double bass at the Bratislava Conservatory and mechanical engineering at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, he enjoyed a 30-year detour as a freelance jazz musician, performing across Central Europe and beyond, recording as a sideman, releasing his own pop project and running a weekly jam session for more than two decades. Somewhere along the way, an American publisher released his book of jazz transcriptions, he wrote 10 Jazz Essays, a collection of analytical studies of the improvisational styles of ten leading Slovak jazz musicians, and he spent three years on the editorial staff of Slovakia’s music magazine Hudobný život. Having successfully avoided a conventional career for most of his life, he eventually found himself back in the technical world as deputy CEO of a company employing more than 200 people. He still suspects that leading a jam session is better preparation for management than most business schools would like to admit. Whether it is also better preparation for writing record reviews remains an open question.