To say that David Rastrick is a hardworking musician is an understatement of monumental proportion. Dave plays in five bands and is a session musician and collaborator with several others. He performs several times a week and can clock up around 120 gigs a year so it’s fair to say that juggling all these commitments requires the skill of an air traffic controller and the stamina of an elite athlete.
Dave also sings, arranges and plays multiple lip-buzz instruments which are instruments where the player vibrates their lips against the mouthpiece to produce sound. He plays the trumpet, flugelhorn, cornet, valve-trombone, tuber and didgeridoo. But wait, there’s more… he also plays electric and acoustic guitars, upright bass instruments, percussion, mandolin, ukulele and keyboards. It’s enough to make your head spin.
But all this is just the visible part of what Dave does as there’s a lot more creativity and hard work going on behind the scenes.
“I’ve got a little bus and I’ve made it into a mini recording studio and rehearsal space,” Dave says.
“It’s full of instruments and it’s where I write and record music. I’m also in the throes of finishing my PhD thesis on Oceanic Jazz. I’m looking at the potential for intercultural collaboration to create a fusion between jazz and the music of the Oceania region.”
Dave’s original studies started with a jazz trumpet course at the WA Academy of Performing Arts and he admits he dropped out twice. He eventually obtained a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Music) with the University of Southern Queensland and went on to do an Honours Degree in Global Jazz. Dave’s academic achievements don’t end there; he’s also got a Diploma in Conservation Land Management and a Degree in Sustainable Development.
“I’ve done a lot of environmental advocacy and forest activism and volunteered with a number of regional environment centres. Protecting the natural environment is very important to me and I’ve even been arrested a couple of times for standing up for what I love.”
As environmental activism rarely provides financial return, Dave says music has always been his primary source of income.
“I’ve done a lot of different things to try and make a living from music. In the early days I was busking and hitchhiked all over the Eastern States with my double base and trumpet. I’ve played in a restaurant duo, played at weddings, parties and events.”
One of Dave’s previous bands even had a 10-year stint as the opening act for WA’s most prestigious annual concert series at Leeuwin Estate when big names like Carole King, James Taylor and Chris Isaac were the headline acts.
Dave’s also held songwriting and recording workshops with First Nations inmates at a WA prison and says it was a wonderfully rewarding experience.
With so many projects on the go it would be easy to get caught up in managing things in the here and now but Dave says he actually has a fixed long term goal.
“My long term music goal, and what I’m really passionate about, is creating fusions of jazz music with global and contemporary music. You could call it a type of crossover music but there’s not always a market for that kind of thing. But to be honest I’m happy playing whatever connects with people.”
At the end of the day Dave says his career is based on the joy that music can bring… to those who play it and to those that hear it.
