The Artistry of… Paul Novotny
Paul Novotny plays and writes as if he is telling a story with his heart and soul. Beautifully lyrical lines, gentle adventures. The images he creates with his music sound familiar, but at the same time they entice you with mystery and what-ifs — a signature all his own.
His bass playing seems to squeeze voices out of the strings. Notes become like words, carriers of pieces of emotion, and he sets up conversations between them. Imagine the notes speaking to the others, telling each other very engaging and important things. Listening, you don’t realize how engaged you have become until it is simply and sweetly too late. In that lateness it is very much OK, because there is no better place to be in all of the moments of his music and music making.
Novotny is as much the storyteller as he is the music artist. Imagine the turning of the storybook pages, the turns of the phrases, the journeys of the plots of the composition, all laid out in music. So charming that when the end comes, like those words — “the end” — at the end of a story, I am ready to hear it all over again.