Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
December 2007
Paul Rucker on Creating beyond Boundaries

Click here to listen to Paul's Practice This! audio clip.

In learning to play music or in educating ourselves as listeners, we often instill boundaries on ourselves to help us understand the music. We tend to think of things in groups: 4 measures or 3 beats to a measure, for example. Or musical forms that we use much of the time such as “head, solo, solo, head-out” in the case of much jazz music, or in songwriting, the very typical “verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus” structure. These are the “boxes” that we create which are useful for learning music and learning how to listen to music. They can also, however, be very limiting when creating new music. It is easy for musicians and listeners alike to get wrapped up in the boxes or blocks that make up music, and to ignore the parts of the music that really make it speak: the phrasing and dynamic nuances. Music is what happens beyond the walls of these boxes.

So much of music relies on the nostalgia effect. Nostalgia is what brings a lot of people to music, but it can be detrimental to the creative process. You can’t help but be influenced by the people you admire, or the music you listened to as a kid, or the music your parents and grandparents listened to. This makes trying to create outside of the box a very difficult thing, but not an impossible one.

There are exercises to help you get outside of the box. When you play a concert, try to play something you have never played before. We are all familiar, as performers, with our own musical vocabulary. We know our own comfort zone, so with the risk of possibly making a mistake, try a different combination of notes, play something you might normally play but in reverse, play something soft instead of loud. The options are endless.

It’s a scary thing to do because the one thing we don’t want to do when performing in public is to make a “mistake,” but in order to advance as musicians we have to be prepared to take risks, and to figure our way out of mistakes. This is where the art comes into play. When we play something new and it turns out to be other than as planned, not necessarily better or worse, we tend to think of this as a mistake, when actually it’s just different.

Embracing what comes out of your instrument, even if your mind deems it as a “mistake,” is a way to start finding your own voice and to create outside of the box.

Interdisciplinary artist Paul Rucker has a lot of irons in the fire these days. In addition to composing music for solo cello and large and small ensembles, he is involved in the visual art community with installations throughout the city. Aside from his busy creative schedule, he is an advocate for arts and arts education in the Seattle area. He works in the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs as community liaison and teaches at Arts Corps, a non-profit youth development program that partners with schools and community organizations to bring free arts classes to youth. Recently he received the 2007 Washington State Arts Commission Music Fellowship. On December 12, he will present a show entitled “Project 12” to celebrate a year of monthly visual art shows—more than 331 days of visual art—and 40 concerts. The show will take place at the Good Shepard Center’s Chapel in Wallingford and will feature Paul performing solo cello for one set and his quintet performing the second set. Two of his installations will also be on view: “Catalyst” and “Eleven Conversations” as well as his latest video, “Busker.” In this edition of Practice This! Paul Rucker talks about creating “outside of the box."