Award-winning bassist Paul Rushka has engaged audiences throughout North America, Europe and Asia with his sonorous tone, assured confident pulse, and eloquently melodic creativity. Active as a performer, composer, arranger and educator, Paul firmly established his reputation as a first-call bassist in Vancouver and made a substantial impact on the Montréal jazz scene during his six years there. Paul’s bass playing has been featured on over 20 commercially released recordings. He has appeared onstage with jazz luminaries such as John Taylor, Joe LaBarbera, Julian Priester, Jimmy Greene, Peter Bernstein, Seamus Blake, Gary Smulyan, Champian Fulton, Brad Turner, Ross Taggart, Cory Weeds, Lorne Lofsky, Kirk MacDonald, Kevin Dean, André White, and many more. In 2003, Paul won a Western Canadian Music Award for Best Jazz Album for his work on the Mike Allen Trio’s Dialectic.
Paul holds a Doctor of Music degree from McGill University, where he was the recipient of a prestigious 3-year Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship from SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), which funded his research on the music of Kenny Wheeler. As part of his doctoral work, Paul travelled to London, England on several occasions, where he met Wheeler personally. In February 2014, Paul presented his research on Wheeler’s music at the Royal Academy of Music as part of its year-long museum exhibition “Kenny Wheeler: Master of Melancholy Chaos,” which celebrated the creation of the Kenny Wheeler Archive.
Learn more about Paul at Paul Rushka
Paul is sponsored by St. Francis Xavier University
