In his job at Trilix Marketing Group, Creative Director Abe Goldstien is a little like a jazz musician. To get to the top, legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker once advised, “master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that (good taste prevents us from specifying exactly what should be forgotten, but you get the drift) you just learned and just play.”

If it’s true, as he’s heard it said, that “jazz is like always dancing on a slippery floor because everything is changing around you,” Goldstien is at the top of his game. At work, he’s improvisational, unafraid of breaking rules and given to creating in the moment, the hallmarks of any good jazz artist. And in his off hours, Goldstien’s passion is jazz. Need proof? Just walk down the stairs to the basement of his home, where shelves of CDs, stacked seven high, create room dividers, and vinyl tracks fill another wall. His jazz collection would rival a radio station’s and numbers in the thousands. If he doesn’t have it, it’s probably because it’s no longer in release.

Goldstien, 53, marches to a different drummer – or, in this case, trumpet’s wail – than many Baby Boomers. “Jazz is all I’ve ever listened to since I was probably 8. I’ve never owned a Beatles album,” he says with some pride.

As a kid growing up in Rochester, N.Y., he hung out with his older siblings’ pal, Chuck Mangione. Yes, that Chuck Mangione, the trumpeter and flügelhornist whose 1977 release “Feels So Good” was recognized by smooth jazz radio stations across the United States as their No. 1 hit.

A love for jazz has been a constant in Goldstien’s life. “If I’m not working,” he says, “I’m doing something with music.”

More truthfully, even when he’s working, he’s doing something with music (there’s a reason he calls his marketing seminars “And All That Jazz,” and uses a jazz quintet as a metaphor for a business organization).

Before he became one of the top creative forces in Greater Des Moines, Goldstien ran a record store called Elysian Fields (in Greek mythology, Elysian fields are the land of happiness to which all the blessed dead are sent) at 31st Street and University Avenue. Not surprising, he sold only jazz. In retrospect, he says with his trademark dry wit, it was like a scene from “High Fidelity,” and he was Jack Black’s exuberant character steering people toward “better jazz than what they wanted to buy, to the real stuff, to the hard stuff.”

He’s one-sixth of the Java Jews, playing accordion with a local klezmer band. Other members are Mark Finkelstein, community relations director for the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines; Iowa Diamond President Chuck Kuba and one of his salesmen, Kurt Bowermaster; Bob Marion, a Johnston chiropractor; and Daniel Manzel, a high school junior who has been a faithful fan of the group since he was 14. The Java Jews, whose repertoire includes dance music, folk songs, theater medleys and jazzy Yiddish pop, plays three or four times a month at coffeehouses, synagogues and churches, bar mitzvahs, parties, and art and civic events.

“We never practice,” Goldstien jokes. “I take that back – we practice every time we play.”

It’s a fun gig, and if it weren’t, Goldstien wouldn’t give up his time for it.

“I like to see people who are excited about performing and having fun,” he says. “If you are having fun performing, people enjoy watching it.”

But he’d overstating the case if he compared the Java Jews sound to the caliber of music he listens to for pleasure.

For a taste of that, reject anything on the Billboard Top 10, he advises. But do pick up the Miles Davis quintessential jazz album, “Kind of Blue,” the one recording he’d want if he were stranded on a desert island.

A person’s first exposure Davis’ jazz classic is as definitive a moment as President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Goldstien says. Everyone who was out of diapers at that time remembers where they were when they heard the news. Goldstien won’t say where he was when he first heard “Kind of Blue,” other than he was in his “misspent youth, under the tutelage of my older brother.” (For anyone who came of age during the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, that’s a fair answer.)

A little Jewish humor escaping, he’s only half joking when he says he’d like to see “WWMDD” (What would Miles Davis do?) bracelets become universally understood and accepted. More seriously, “If Miles Davis does not get you hooked, you are deaf or you have no soul,” he says.

What accomplished jazz artists touch in Goldstien’s soul is a sense of freedom and diversity, important cultural values in his life as well.

For example, when he brought Jessica Williams, widely regarded as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, to Des Moines for his 50th birthday, his keen eye detected just a slight moment of hesitation when Williams, hands poised above the keyboard appeared to be ready to play one melody, then set off on a different course that altered the piece.

In that respect, “jazz is the sound of surprise,” as noted critic Whitney Balliet once wrote. When bassist Henry Grimes and his trio performed last month at Grinnell College, “every note was a surprise to me, and I will bet it was a surprise to them,” Goldstien says. He felt a smile spreading across his face as the musicians took an unexpected turn, and tears spilling from his eyes in response to the way they handled a particular ballad.

Jazz, he says, evokes “the full gamut of emotions, from joy to sorrow.”

Don’t misunderstand. Goldstien isn’t against other genres of music. It’s a pleasant twist of fate that his 12-year-old son, Hayden, also is a jazz aficionado. “He goes to conventions and hangs with bass players I was listening to when I was 12,” Goldstien says of his son, who plays stand-up bass. There’s only a trace of mock envy in his voice when he notes that Hayden knows people like virtuoso bassist Dominic Duval by first name.

“One of the coolest things about jazz is the fact that it’s intergenerational,” he says.

But his 16-year-old daughter, Langen, works at Peeples Music and reviews heavy metal bands like Slipknot, a passion he supports and encourages.

“It doesn’t matter to me what you are listening to as long as you get something out of it, and have an interest outside of what you do,” he says. “If the only people you interact with are people you do the same work as, it’s going to be pretty damn boring.”