ASBURY PARK - It's Friday night in the small beachside city of Asbury Park, New Jersey. The amusement rides are now gone, some of them dissembled and tucked into corners of anonymous storage units, the rest relegated to vintage postcards and vague memories.

The boardwalk, however, the city's measuring stick for success, is alive again. Just a few years ago it was a gutted paradise for peddlers, prostitutes and stray cats. Today, an eclectic mix of tourists and teenagers share the mile long boardwalk with bikers, bar-hoppers and thriving businesses. Buskers plugged into amps no bigger than shoeboxes jam before knots of children. Once forgotten pinball machines look out from behind the glass of the new arcade at the Atlantic with candy-colored grins, glad to be back. And along the strip, like beacons that refuse to relinquish their relevancy, the Stone Pony and Wonder Bar, those rock 'n' roll venues of lore, loom over Ocean Avenue with their usual air of stately dilapidation.

Then you head south toward the Casino (which was never actually a casino) and follow to downtown the shallow blackness of Wesley Lake, which separates the city from the dry Methodist enclave of Ocean Grove. It takes only a few seconds before you see the people mulling about on the sidewalk, encased in smoke and chatter, hovering beneath the lights - purple, pink, white and a neon buzz of blue velvet - conjuring the only two words in the English language that tell you everything is going to be just fine: jazz club.

Sometime around 8 o'clock she slides onto the bandstand, draped in darkness. Pint glasses fall from lips and settle on slick tables, missing napkins. The lighting is set accordingly and her silver-plated Yamaha Custom Z glints faintly before you notice the shock of Florida blonde hair cascading down past her shoulders, the model figure, the magnetism she elicits to chilled spines, that demanding presence every artist who has ever earned a modicum of respect the old fashioned way carries with them to both club and concert hall.

Someone counts off. The backline is established. And then she does it. She lifts the reed to her lips and plays her alto with a full yet sprightly tone drenched in soul, like she's Cannonball Adderly's daughter and had Kool and the Gang for big brothers. It could be jazz, sure, smoothed out. Or it could be an obviously trained technician playing pop music, or funk, or instrumentally driven R & B. It doesn't really matter, because the style will change from song to song, set to set, and once you rid yourself of the instinct to label things, you realize that the music is reflective of its maker - honest, unafraid of change, the sum of her influences and experiences - just like the city in which she is playing, and that it can only be called one thing: Mindi. Simply Mindi.

Mindi Abair is not a traditionalist. If she were, she wouldn't be able to execute the balancing act of achieving both commercial success and artistic fulfillment with such assured serenity that it's easy to forget how much is stacked against her.

She is a beautiful woman in a profession, according to traditionalists, dominated by men. Her main instrument, the alto saxophone, is the weapon of choice for some of jazz's greatest innovators such as Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman, and thus carries with it a tradition of alarming virtuosity. And although her discography is ample proof of her stylistic dexterity, she remains a thoroughly trained musician best known for finding success in genres - smooth jazz and pop - which, in the great serenade of jazz, are passages often overlooked by aficionados, if not consumers. Luckily, Abair is not a traditionalist, and these so-called obstacles have stunted the flow of her career about as much as a couple of knives stabbing rushing water.

"It's not about doing what's been done before," she said in reference to her latest album, "In Hi-Fi Stereo," and what could be the tagline for her entire career thus far. "It's about drawing on what and who inspires you, and bringing it into your world and making it your own - and then putting it out there for a new generation of people who love jazz and soul."

In an often divided jazz community where many place value solely in the cerebral innovator or the conservative throwback to yesteryear, Abair's winding path to success has been a fresh departure from the norm. She is, as they say, a true artist, in that her artistic output has been a product of her vaporous moods and life experiences rather than a pretense. The genres within which she has made her living are of no importance - artistry is artistry. She has made personal albums tethered to particular moments in time, like stand-alone time capsules of sound, all of which have progressed instrumentally, vocally and conceptually like chapters in the book of her life. As a result she has spent serious time polishing her skill in a bevy of genres, from pop, jazz and rock to soul and funk with a signature jazz tinge.

This is a risk for any artist. Many fans struggle to embrace drastic changes, others simply refuse to follow an artist on their lifelong journey of expression. Media outlets and record labels prefer easily-defined artists for marketability purposes. But for Abair, leaping from style to style has become a sort of trademark, a skeleton around which she can flesh out her mosaic of inspiration. And this risk, which she has barely stopped to acknowledge, has certainly paid off.

"In Hi-Fi Stereo," an upbeat love letter to the Golden Age of funk ornamented with hypnotic sax lines and bluesy vocals, debuted this May at number two on Billboard's Contemporary Jazz Charts and is currently number one on Smooth Jazz's Top 50 radio. Her single, "Be Beautiful," a stripped-down ballad bursting with soul that sounds like a funky instrumental cousin of Al Green's "Love and Happiness," is currently holding strong at number one on the Contemporary Jazz Charts.

This is merely a snapshot of the recent success Abair has achieved. She has been doing this her entire life, from riding on tour buses as a toddler, training at Berklee, busking in the Santa Monica streets to recording with blues legends and blowing out arenas alongside pop stars. It's been nothing short of a journey for Abair and her vagabond muse; and tucked away inside the paradoxes which cling to her like the little jeweled dresses she dons on stage, replete with horn and heels, is her true staying power - her pliancy as an artist - and what finally brings her to Asbury Park - her old school commitment to jazz.

This Friday, August 27, Abair will slip onto the bandstand at Chico's House of Jazz on Lake Avenue in Asbury Park for two live sets, beginning at 8 and 10 p.m. respectively. Although her bombshell looks, brooding ballads and her ability to dance between breathy vocals and deep, full tones - all with perfect intonation - has made her a household name in the pop jazz world, there's another reason why she has shown up to perform in the City by the Sea. His name is Charles "Chico" Rouse Jr., and like Abair, he comes from a music family, a family that brought him in direct contact with saxophone royalty.

Chico's father, the late Charles Rouse Sr., played tenor sax in the Thelonious Monk Quartet in the '60s and was hailed as an imaginative soloist. In addition to releasing albums as a bandleader and experimenting with bossa nova, Rouse also played with Billy Eckstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Ron Carter and Duke Ellington in a long and prolific career. To say the younger Rouse, a jazz musician himself, knows a talented saxophonist when he hears one is an understatement, and the addition of Abair to this summer's lineup which has included The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Radam Schwartz, Anthony Nelson Jr., Nelson Rangell and Dave Valetin, is but another feather in his cap.

Abair grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, but she was born into music, that traveling troupe where chord changes are as common as commas and question marks in proper language, and the rhythm section are your aunts and uncles.

Her grandmother was an opera singer, and her father played both the saxophone and B3 organ in a soul group called The Entertainers. Before she was five, Abair had logged serious time on the open road; the entire family followed The Entertainers around the country in the '70s, getting an up-close look at the pay-your-dues lifestyle which Abair would later adopt as her own. She took to the piano at five, the saxophone in elementary school and then the band in high school. Still, she remained far from the funky seductress with the kinetic stage presence she is today. The serious jazz influences - Cannonball Adderly, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis - had yet to permeate her daily life. Instead, she did what she loved.

"As a kid, I was a girl who listened to the radio," Abair recalled in an interview with Smooth Jazz Notes. "I didn't buy a lot of records, and I wasn't into jazz. But, as time goes on, if you're a sax player and you stick with it, you really do have to delve into jazz and I didn't have a lot of that around me."

This didn't last long, though. The budding artist searches for established ones within whom they can recognize a faint glimmer of themselves. It's an organic process, and often an unconscious one, like a novelist turning over an entire library before he writes his first book. For Abair, this role was first filled by alto saxophonist David Sanborn, best known for his unique blend of radio-friendly jazz, pop and R & B, as well as an open distrust of labels and genres.

Although Abair has essentially made a career out of this style and will always be mentioned as part of the Sanborn school, she has, through simple honesty, transcended the trappings of definition, reinventing herself with each album for better or worse, ala Miles Davis, and in turn has been rewarded with an array of opportunities foreign to the average jazz musician. From touring with Mandy Moore, playing with Keb Mo' and Adam Sandler, or having her music appear in television shows and films, Abair has been one of the few contemporary artists who has been able to fully benefit from contemporary technology and consumer tastes - Abair is active in social networks and hosts a nationally syndicated radio show - and yet still prove that she has the chops of a swaggering, well-schooled altoist.

After a year of college in Florida, Abair transferred to the Berklee School of Music in Boston, from which she graduated Magna cumm laude, and where she first met friend, future collaborator and 2010 Female R & B Vocalist of the Year nominee, Lalah Hathaway.

In her interview with Smooth Jazz Notes, she spoke about the role Berklee played in her musical career. "I learned just as much from the jam sessions we'd have all night and playing in all of the clubs. I learned as much from that as I learned from the actual school because the community of it is just so immense. All we did is live and eat and breathe music...It was really a place to grow and at that point I needed it. Really all I had done was be in school bands and listen to people play. I knew that I wanted to play more than anything, but I had never had the chance to reach out and be with people my own age to start a band or have them play my music."

After graduation, Abair headed west. She arrived in Los Angeles with little to her name but talent and desire. There was no honeymoon period. Music gigs were scarce. Waitressing had run its course. But the weather was warm so she took to the streets and blew her horn not for fame, but for the love of it, because every day without music was like a another nail in the coffin. And for this she was rewarded.

When you're playing in the streets, you never know who may walk by. Pastors, pushers, policemen, former presidents, top-flight pianists; they're all out there, slipping in and out of the sea of faces watching you. Though meeting a former president may have been nice, Bobby Lyle, the soul-jazz veteran down with the Yellowjackets and Sly and the Family Stone, was better. It wasn't long before Abair was touring the globe with Lyle, hitting Japan, Korea and the U.S. After that, the rest, as they say, was history, for gigs beget gigs, albums beget albums, and dreams beget dreams.

You see her on stage, her seal-shoulders dipping and rising as her notes leap up and down the register, her lines thrusting forward with a power you wouldn't expect from a woman that resembles silk flapping in the wind. She stops to sing and it's like her finger is scratching your chin, the come-hither notes so soaked in sass the floor's polished with lust. It's hard to understand how she fuses the party and placidity with such nuptial bliss. It's hard to understand her fidelity to both the forgotten past and the forward tug of new experience. It's hard to understand how such a hard-driving sax player can exist in the pop world, or how a woman who seems tailor-made for the pop world can be such a virtuoso. That is to say, it's hard to understand if you're a traditionalist. Luckily, Mindi Abair doesn't prescribe to such theories. And neither should jazz.

For more information, visit: www.mindiabair.com