"Just Show Up": The Uncle Paul Principle

Paul's focus shifted from the law to music composition

My Uncle Paul has a music studio set up in his house. The room is populated with drums – djembes, congas, snares, bass drums, and high hats. It’s also full of recording equipment he uses to compose his own music, meticulously assembled from samples and remixed with a computer and soundboard. Right now he has multiple albums – based on world beat, jazz, latin fusion, and whatever else suits his fancy – for sale through iTunes and other online services. What fascinates me is not where he is now but how he got there. Once he was a lawyer in Pittsburgh who dabbled in music; now he’s a musician who dabbles in law. That transition took more than 30 years. But it started with something pretty simple – just showing up.

In the mid-1970s, Paul was dating a woman who was in an African dance class, and one day she dragged him down to watch. The only white guy in the room, he liked the vibe of the drum players that accompanied the dancing. So he came to a few more sessions. One of the guys offered to sell him an old, cracked conga drum. Here’s how Paul tells it:

They all figured I was a liberal white guy who would come a couple of times and then disappear. Most of them were from the ghetto, and many had been in jail. And I was a lawyer. I wasn’t exactly trustworthy. But I just kept coming – once a week on Wednesdays.

Every time I went there, I felt a certain fear. I didn’t know if it was going to come out right, and I knew they didn’t like me to begin with. It was a question of whether I could hang in there long enough for them to know who I am as a person, not who I am as a skin. That was the key. And after about the fourth year, they realized I wasn’t going away.

In many styles of African music, one beat is the heartbeat that plays all the way through. Percussionists layer things over that. Paul started with that beat and began trying to work his way up. He also began to practice at home, listening to music and trying to play along. Ultimately, he stuck his head up and realized he’d gone from just trying to survive the drumming in dance class, to something more profound:

This was just a sideshow for me when I started. But as I played it over time, I started to fall in love with it. Eventually, you look up and see that you’ve gotten into a stride, kind of like a runner. You’re not putting a lot of energy out, but you’re making a sound that’s running and easy. You realize, OK this is where I can live. This is a relaxing and energizing place.

I think of the bare fact of showing up over and over again as the first Uncle Paul principle. It’s the idea that you keep going while trying not to judge your own progress or exactly where you’re heading. Instead, you get to look up sometime down the line and see where you are. I’ll save the story of how he went from drumming to composing for another post.