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Born and raised in Vienna, bassist Paul Ruhland would listen to jazz (Harry James, Benny Goodman, Count Basie) on his crystal set in his bedroom "while my parents listened to Viennese waltzes in the front room," he laughs. While studying classical bass at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, Paul Ruhland played jazz professionally in service clubs in Vienna. "That's how I got into playing jazz," says Ruhland, who studied bass for two years before he left for Canada in 1952 and "from then on, it's self-taught."

Moving first to Winnipeg where a 3-week stint at an accounting firm didn't last very long ("I kept falling asleep around 2 o'clock in the afternoon," he chuckles), Paul Ruhland happened to stop by a music store. The salesman, an alto saxophonist, started chatting with Ruhland and took him downstairs to the basement to show him a bunch of pianos. An upright bass was leaning in the corner, and Ruhland took it up and played it. "His mouth fell open and he said, 'Jack's gotta hear you, Jack's gotta hear you!'" says Ruhland, who was introduced to radio disc jockey Jack Shapiro and offered a gig on the spot for the following night. "Two days later, I was a full-fledged member of the [musicians] union and I had already played a gig with Jack Shapiro. And I said, 'Uh huh, this is the way it's going.'"

Ruhland entered the Vancouver music scene where he and saxophonist Wally Snyder were good friends and roommates. The two musicians were hired to play in Doug Parker's dance band at the Embassy Ballroom along with other well-known Vancouver names including Jack Fulton, Stew Barnett, Cliff Binyon, and Al Johnson. "We played jazz when we had a chance at the Cellar," says Ruhland, who remembers the club as an afterhours hangout. "Everybody that was playing jazz was doing it at the Cellar," where Ruhland had a chance to play with the legendary Art Pepper. "From then on, I said, 'that's really jazz.'"

"[Composition is] an auto-didactic venture."
-Paul Ruhland

Later, Paul Ruhland started composing and arranging under the mentorship of Dave Robbins, who hired Ruhland to play in his band at the Cave and strongly encouraged him to write more and more arrangements that soon turned into one piece a week for Robbins' CBC radio show "Jazz Workshop". A self-taught composer/arranger, Ruhland says, "You can't teach composition. You gotta listen to what somebody else did with the material... You have to listen and figure it out for yourself. I know guys that had composition classes for four years and couldn't write a four-bar introduction. Either you have it or you don't."

Ruhland kept up with an extremely busy and diverse career in Vancouver music scene. "I was playing at the Cave, I was doing radio shows, I was playing in the symphony, I was playing in the chamber orchestra with John Avison. And then at night when I came home after the Cave, I started writing 'til 4 in the morning or so," says Ruhland, who moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1963 and collaborated with many renowned musicians including Red Norvo and pioneer flautist Sam Most. Returning to Vancouver in the eighties, Ruhland played steadily with his longtime friend Fraser MacPherson in a trio with Oliver Gannon, and at other Vancouver venues including the Classical Joint. More recently, he has written more than half of 250 arrangements for the 19-piece WOW Band which includes many of Vancouver's best jazz musicians from the fifties and sixties. "That's what I like to do best of all," says Ruhland.

VIDEO

Paul Ruhland on composing/arranging

Don Thompson on Paul Ruhland