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Arts & Entertainment

Ben Musa: Kirkland's Master of the Big and Booming Stand-Up Bass

The upright bassist, professor, movie-score musician and sideman to the stars plays it all -- jazz, classical and folk-rock.

YOU MIGHT have found yourself swaying in your shoes, moving to the deep rhythms of Ben Musa’s huge double bass if you happened to be in the crowd at the down at Kirkland's .

Bursts of full, rounded notes sailed off the low, resonant strings of Musa’s six-foot stand-up bass and into the audience, as people sat along the Lake Washington waterfront or strolled the shore.

The Finn Hill-based folk quartet Natch’l Thang was doing an all-acoustic improvisation of the '60s signature song by Crosby, Stills & Nash, Wooden Ships.

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Then Musa switched from a familiar thumping pizzicato to a long bowed solo, something people don’t often hear from a rock-n-roll band.

“People tend to have a lot of curiosity about the acoustic bass because they don’t see it very much,” says Musa, a leading classical and jazz bass performer in the Puget Sound area and teacher who lives on Finn Hill.

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Bass players sit at the back of the orchestra, their deep, unamplified notes adding important texture, but they’re seldom featured as solo performers.

That’s changing, though, as classical performers like Edgar Meyer ‘have put the bass solo on the map,” says Musa, who teaches bass performance at Western Washington University, as well as private lessons to junior high and high school students.

Meanwhile, he adds, jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, who took a Grammy for Best New Artist of the Year in February 2011 (upsetting teen idol Justin Bieber), has given new visibility to the instrument known to lovers of jazz artists like Charles Mingus and Ray Brown.

So there are a lot of classical venues around the Puget Sound where you could ironically not see Musa playing, although his music would be integral to the performance (and he’s happy playing this supportive role). He regularly plays with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Auburn Symphony, the Seattle Opera and other groups. Musa has performed with the likes of Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. He played in the now-defunct Northwest Chamber Orchestra at the . At Bastyr University he recorded sound tracks to movies like Mr. Holland’s Opus and Die Hard II.

You’d get a more intimate sense of Musa’s playing in smaller jazz groups like the New York-based Paul Meyers ensemble and the local Michael-Ellyn and the Sun Breaks, where he loves to take a bowed solo.

“What the bow does is allow for that sustained tone for playing sonorous, melodic lines,” says Musa.

Taking old familiar tunes that people can sing to, and then “putting a different element on them,” is one thing he loves about playing in the folk-rock band Natch’l Thang, says Musa.

MUSA SPENT much of his childhood and college years in Eugene, Oregon, where his parents, an endocrinologist and nurse, had music playing constantly. As a child, he’d always loved hearing his sister play cello. However, it wasn’t until his third year of college that he switched majors from electrical engineering to music, at the University of Oregon.

One day, watching a classmate assembling an integrated circuit board, surrounded by stacks of technical manuals, Musa turned to friend and said, “Let’s start a band!” 

Returning to a passion that began while playing electric-bass in a high school band, Musa decided to study classical bass. Moving to Chicago’s Northwestern University, he finished a Masters in Music Performance, and, soon after, went on tour with the international Orchestral Academy of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, founded by Leonard Bernstein.

Rehearsing for a concert at Tchaikovsky Hall in Gorky Park, Moscow, Musa says, the master composer and conductor taught him an important lesson about listening. It was during a beautiful woodwind interlude where the rest of the orchestra was doing a shabby job supporting the oboes.

 “Bernstein stopped the orchestra,” said Musa, slapping down an imaginary baton. The famous conductor walked over to an empty piano. “With no score, no piano part,” says Musa, “he proceeded to play the entire 32 friggin’ bars himself. And then he said, ‘Do you hear the oboe now?’ "

Experiences like these have colored Musa’s long career as a private bass teacher, college professor, and performer playing in a range of venues.

“One of the most unique things about (Ben) is that he’s a high-level professional both in the classical and jazz performance realms,” says Jeff Bratitich, a professor of double bass at the University of North Texas. Musa’s professor at Northwestern, Bratitich is impressed by how many students Musa has turned out who have gone on to high music appointments with major orchestras.

Brandon McLean, who now plays bass in Tampa’s Florida Orchestra, is one of them. He credits Musa, his first music teacher, for his perpetually positive encouragement. “He does a really good job of encouraging students to explore what they can creatively bring to the instrument,” says McLean.

Musicians also owe it to their communities to share their talent and foster the cooperation and collaboration that music breeds, Musa feels.

“Events like DennyFest make for intimate feelings, and warmth and closeness among neighbors.” That adds to the beauty of this place, and our closeness to parks and nature, he says. “It’s all about community.”

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