Watching Katz “live the life” influenced one of his former cello students, Brandon Vamos, to be a member of the acclaimed Pacifica Quartet. Vamos recalls his student days at the Eastman School of Music, where the Cleveland Quartet was in residence for 20 years. “Being on the periphery of Paul’s career with the Cleveland Quartet,” he says, “I saw him play the most personal repertoire there is, having control over what he played. It looked ideal.”

The Pacifica continues to seek Katz’s opinion. Vamos remembers that after one of the group’s early performances of Beethoven’s Op. 131, the quartet had to dash for the airport before talking to Katz, who had heard the concert. Vamos called him from the terminal. “He talked to me for 25 or 30 minutes about specific things he remembered,” says Vamos. “He understands the nuts and bolts that make music work. You can take his specific comments and make sounds that shape your whole feeling about a piece, help you conceptualize it. His comments are always concise and clearly stated, never confusing. In that one conversation, he completely changed the way we play the piece.”

During a day of cello lessons, quartet coaching sessions, and a cello master class, Katz treats each person differently. He may begin by eliciting a student’s musical imagery, discussing the character of a passage, or by focusing on a physical challenge. He has a genius for making up simple exercises and for suggesting them at precisely the moment when a student is about to become frustrated. He’s like the plumber in the joke, who fixes a problem by hitting a pipe. The secret is knowing where to hit the pipe, what to change in a cellist’s posture or an ensemble’s intonation.

He follows no particular method, basing his approach on what a student seems to need and on the pedagogy of the great teachers of the last generation with whom he studied: Gabor Rejto, Gregor Piatigorsky, Bernard Greenhouse, Pablo Casals, Leonard Rose, and Janos Starker.

With each student, he strives to discover comfortable, even physically pleasurable, ways to produce expressive tone and deliver a convincing performance. Having suffered serious health problems himself, he appreciates the importance of using natural motions, minimizing muscle tension, and respecting the attributes of individual bodies. “Sometimes I talk to students about the physical pleasure of playing,” he says. “They blush, because most of us are shy about discussing physical pleasure, but they nod their heads, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

“When the bow softens and you feel the way you pull the string, feel your arm sink in, it’s a way of enjoying sound and motion.”