Local artist utilizes music as a form of expression

PHOTO: Oscar Wisnia plays the drums

By Elina Hibel

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

Pulling inspiration from West Africa to Northern California, Oscar Wisnia, a senior who transferred at the start of this year from Davis High to Rio Americano High, marches to the beat of his own drum. 

When he received his first drum set at age nine, he found a way to release his anger one that didn’t harm his walls. “When I got my first pair of drumsticks, I went ‘oh crap, I can beat on stuff and nobody’s getting mad at me’,” Wisnia said. 

Wisnia said that while he still plays the drums as a way to release his feelings, it serves another purpose as well. “[Now] it’s much more artistic expression, but it’s always been an expression,” Wisnia said. 

When he first began playing the drums, Wisnia gravitated towards rock and metal music styles. Wisnia said that with the help of the DHSjazz program, instructor Thomas Slabaugh and other students, he began exploring the world of jazz.

“If you really dig into [jazz] it’s a super intense, living music that’s really important to general American culture. […] The intensity of jazz is similar to the intensity of metal music if you find the good stuff,” Wisnia said. 

Recently Wisnia has drawn inspiration from West African percussion ensembles as well as Konnakol, a music form originating from South India where all the rhythm is sung. “I really try to draw from places that aren’t white American,” Wisnia said.  

This year, Wisnia had the opportunity to play in the California All Northern Band and the California All State Band, both prestigious music programs that select the best student musicians from California. 

Right now, Wisnia plays in a duo with Paloma Cobbs Silva who plays the saxophone and clarinet. “We play this wacked out crazy jazz stuff,” Wisnia said. The duo is playing at Twin Lotus Thai in Sacramento, on Friday, Oct. 13 at 6:30 P.M.

Wisnia wants to continue pursuing music professionally and plans to move to New York after high school and probably go to college for music. “It’s all that I would like to do with myself. The music is still alive,” Wisnia said. “I hope to do respect to the great musicians that came before me and do respect to myself too.”

One thing Wisnia said he’s learning is that “as you get better and better at something you tend to receive more and more critiques from more and more experienced people.” While he’s at an “awesome” place, he said he’s at a place where he is receiving a lot of criticism from people he respects.

“When that happens, you can get pretty scared pretty fast, because making art is a vulnerable thing, […] when we get scared we tend to become less vulnerable and tend to close in on ourselves so that we can’t get hurt as easily. When I receive all the criticism that I do, the natural inclination is to close in on myself and play things that are less criticizable because they are not as vulnerable.” 

To Wisnia, being able to evaluate criticism is an important thing to learn. “If you do everything that everybody tells you, you will end up becoming something that is not yourself,” Wisnia said. “Evaluate every piece of advice but don’t follow every piece of advice.”

Wisnia’s advice to student musicians is to “get a good teacher, work really hard and obey nobody.”