Next Level Bassist Left Hand

anything if I wanted to play the bass for a
living. I didn’t know for most of the time
I was at Curtis if I would be playing in an
orchestra, or what I might do. I always kept
on playing with fiddles, mandolins, banjos,
and guitars because I loved it so much. The
more I did it, the more I could tell I was
doing something I really enjoyed, as well as
something other people didn’t do, and there
was maybe something unique there that
could be a source of identity for me. I loved
the creativity, unique voices, writing, and
aural tradition I found in making music with
those folks.
At a certain point, I started to feel like I was
spread too thin because I was practicing
excerpts - I wasn’t really the best orchestral
excerpt player, and I knew that because I went
to school with some really great players on
that path. It wasn’t really the thing I was the
best at, but I was still trying to do it all the
time, and get better. One summer I attended
the National Orchestral Institute, and I met
Jordan Tice, who I’ve been making music
with ever since. We were making music in the
practice rooms there around the orchestra festival.
I told Ali Yazdanfar, who was one of the
guest teachers there, that I love making music
in a variety of styles on the bass. I really loved
the classical repertoire, but I also really loved
this other thing I was doing. It was starting to
feel like if I were to take an orchestra audition,
I would have to really buckle down and focus
on that 100 percent. Ali’s advice to me was
“Do everything you love and do it really well.”
Eventually, he said, something would come
along that I wouldn’t be able to pass up.
R: I felt the same way, that I was the square peg
trying very hard to fit myself into a round hole.
It wasn’t natural to me and I had to just bust
my butt to go in that direction, but I felt like
there was something really important that I
was taking away from preparing for auditions.
Do you believe that it was beneficial?
P: Probably. I sometimes spent all day
practicing orchestral repertoire and I didn’t
seem to make much progress. Some of my
classmates at Curtis had great advice for me.
They would tell me that putting those hours
in wasn’t going to hurt my playing, it was
going to help. The fact that I was working
hard and practicing was going to have long
term benefits. Sometimes it’s frustrating to
spend a large portion of your day in a
practice room slugging away at rudiments
and excerpts. You can feel like you’re wasting
your time, and it might be true that you’re
wasting some time, but overall it had a good
impact on me as a bass player - working and
expanding my usage of the instrument in
general has been useful.
R: What sort of music has given you the confidence
and security you have when playing
your instrument? Was it Bach, études, scales? A
combination of many things?
P: 3 different things come to mind. First of
all, the way I play now is really closely related
to the way I played when I was 9 years old. I
stand up, I play with a high endpin, standing
on the side of the bass. I look a little weird
compared to the mainstream bass pedagogy.
The familiarity with the instrument and the
connection with the string that you cultivate
by playing for a long time has helped me.
Secondly, working on a lot of music and
developing a vast variety of repertoire
(which excerpt playing does) gave me a lot
of different tools. You get familiar with a lot
of different pizzicatos, dynamics, the range
of the instrument, playing across the strings.
That’s partially how the audition repertoire
is designed - they want to hear you cover
the breadth of the instrument, so they pick
different techniques for you to display.
As I was going through college, a lot of people
had a sense that I was restrained, because I
would be playing and trying to execute things.
There was a sense that I wasn’t making as
much music as I was capable of. That leads
me to the 3 rd and most important point, which
is feeling unrestrained and feeling like I’m
making music helps me to have confidence
on the instrument. I think I’ve found that in
greater magnitude when playing music that
I had a closer relationship to. Feeling like
you’re lost in creating music, and that music
is what matters allows you and your ego, your
perfectionism to drip away. You get taken
over by the music. Playing with people, enjoying
the musical heritage and process are what
really allow this to happen.
R: If I could summarize, it sounds like playing
with people was a strength for you.
P: Yeah, absolutely, it is about playing with
people. The bass as a solo instrument puts a
lot of pressure on you, but there’s a great way
to be a solo voice within music that I really
cherish. It can be more flattering for me, and
takes some of the pressure off. It helped me
turn my sights toward the music.
R: I’ve tried to write a lot of stuff for solo bass
over the last decade, which is something I feel I
need to do because it’s so far outside of my real
musical identity, which is being a team player.
To me, playing with others is the whole point.
P: My technical approach is an amalgam
of how I grew up playing, techniques I
developed at Curtis working on a variety of
music, a whole lot of Edgar’s influence, and
also a whole lot of influence from bluegrass
bass playing, mostly when I’m playing with
a band. It’s hard to say what my technique is
because it’ll change depending on what I’m
playing. For instance, to make my strings
sound like gut or just have the consistency of
a bluegrass bass, I kind of grab and mute with
my left hand in a way that a classical pedagogue
would cringe at. But that’s the sound.
Studying orchestral repertoire makes you
stronger because you are forced to learn how
to make huge leaps when playing something
like Strauss, holding down a machine gun
rhythm through Beethoven, and so forth.
When I was working on this repertoire, I
diverged a lot from the way I started playing
the bass - I would sit down to play, raise my
string action - and I think that I incorporated
some of this technique into my current
playing. I’ve always had this split between
how I played solos and how I played excerpts.
In retrospect it seems silly to have tried
changing so many things!
My first teacher was Rosemary Petzel, and
she would come teach me and my next door
neighbor for private lessons. She is a sweet
lady who likes to tell jokes, and she made sure
she wasn’t putting a pressure on us to only
focus on music, and that we could continue
to be normal kids. On the bass, she put an
emphasis on being well rounded. I don’t know
that a lot of teachers do this, but she taught
me how to play boogie woogie bass lines
while accompanying me, and then made me
play my Bach piece. After working on that,
we would switch to playing a blues, always
keeping it fun. I studied with her for about 5
or 6 years, from age 9 to around 14. She was
an angel of a lady. I jumped around through
several teachers after that. I got into the
Disney’s Young Musicians Symphony
Orchestra, which opened my eyes to a
community of people in the state and really
the world, playing music and doing what I do.
I was a home body, I didn’t go to orchestra
camps over the summer. I went to a few jazz
camps in Wisconsin that were a week or two
long. After the Disney orchestra experience,
I started doing concerto competitions, and
taking lessons from virtuoso bass teachers like
Catalin Rotaru who was located in Wisconsin
then. I studied with Richard Davis for a year.
SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL BASSIST 23