Two days with Rufus Reid

Playing with a seasoned musical professional – someone who walks in the room with the richness of decades of music-making rolling from their skin – is of a value hard to explain. When considering taking on extra projects at music school these days, I always ask myself, “will this push me to grow?” Playing in a string quartet to perform some of Rufus Reid’s original compositions for combo and strings was a definite “yes.”

“You see, I LIVE for the unexpected,” Master Reid said with a twinkle in his eye at the start of rehearsal. That was our cue that things would move in delightful and indeed unexpected ways. We were set in a traditional string quartet half circle. I, as the violist, had the violins to my left and the cello to my right. The jazz combo added the dimensions of ‘tang-tang-ta-tang’, the round, warm double bass pizzicato sound behind me, as well as the sprightly keys beyond the violins. Rehearsing was a communicative dance of locking eyes with the first violinist to pick up major cues and taking softer cues from the bodies and instruments of the second violinist and cellist – all while communicating with and channeling the rhythm section around us.

These rehearsals carried a slightly different purpose than I am used to from classical styles, in that the main focus, explicitly, was to get comfortable with the way the others moved and stretched within the score – not to practice an exact rendition of the notes on the page that would be cut and pasted to the concert. This phenomenon is something I believe we miss, or at least miss to say explicitly in classical training – that the overarching purpose of rehearsals is to get to know each other and to find that comfort and trust in order to experience moments of freedom together. Tweaking out-of-tune harmonies, isolating challenging rhythms, and dynamic development belong as well, but all of those details live under the arch of budding familiarity.

Before our shared concert, Rufus Reid gave a masterclass. It started with the audience humming a given tone, and Rufus improvising a solo on the double bass over that. “Thank you,” he said to us as he finished up his composition full of imagination, form, and texture, all pulled from his experiential canon. “Now, what would it be if each of you needed to fill the room with your sound for 20 minutes.” What a daunting and curiosity-inducing call to action! Sitting in the audience, my stomach dropped out of nervousness and vulnerability at the thought of that challenge. I started grasping for musical memories, rhythmic frames, and patterns. Though I was by no means ready to take on that challenge verbatim, the warmth of my musical memory sent out a wave of comfort, and I began to get the sense that something like the wisdom of his musical experiences is something that I too have access to and that it is already taking form from within.

As for the concert – it happened. The music had a start and an end, mistakes were made, and phenomenal and unexpected delights came out of the woodwork to us – performer and audience alike Most notable, however, is that the concert, at least for me, was NOT the highlight of the time spent.