Bio

Jazz Violinist, Band Leader & Educator

About Me

The turning point for me as a musician was bluegrass camp in Elkins, West Virginia.  By the second day of camp, I felt (as they say) “that I’d died and gone to heaven.”  The classes were great, but the after-hours jam sessions were the kicker—playing tunes and improvising with other people into the night.  It was incredibly liberating.  By the time the week was over, I knew that I wanted to find a way to immerse myself in music.

I was forty years old, had a family with young children and a Master’s degree in English. But I felt that if I didn’t try to follow my real dream of playing jazz, I might never be able to do it. To make a long story short, with the support of my husband and friends, I graduated in 1992 from Berklee College of Music, where I studied with Matt Glaser and, afterwards, with legendary jazz teacher Charlie Banacos. I have been studying, playing, composing and arranging, and teaching ever since.

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Performing

To me, improvising (“composing in real time”) with other musicians is deeply satisfying on so many levels. It is creative and expressive, individual and collective, humbling and glorious, always more than the sum of its parts, one of the most joyful of human endeavors. In the words of Louis Armstrong, “What we play is life,” and that includes the downs as well as the ups—sometimes in the same moment.

Performing is a way to share this experience with other people, to bring everyone along for the ride, because the audience is part of the creative process too.

I have had the good fortune to play with many wonderful musicians since Berklee, both as a freelancer and a band member. For several years I was in a jazz string quartet (the Underground Jazz String Quartet) and Western Omelet, a western swing band. My current group, the Paula Zeitlin Quintet (PZQ) performs regularly around the Boston area. We have released two CDs, “Walk a Little Slower” (2004) and “PZQ” (2008), both on SAZL Records.