Zuill Bailey never goes
wanting for adventure. A few years ago, a day after speeding through
the streets of Tel Aviv in an armored limo under armed guard on the
way to a command performance for world diplomats, the 31-year-old cellist
found himself in a tense situation while crossing the Jordanian border
to rejoin a group of friends.
"A soldier at the checkpoint
looked at the box I was carrying and looked at me and said, 'I don't
believe that you play the cello!' I said, 'I do.' He said, 'Prove it!'
He's got a gun. What am I going to do?" recalls Bailey, finally
able to laugh at the experience. "So I pulled the cello out of
the box and asked, 'What do you want to hear?' Fortunately, that's all
I needed to say to convince him that I was telling the truth, since
I was shaking so badly."
Bailey—who probably
once envisioned an existence of serene concerts and quiet dinner parties
with no Uzi submachine guns in sight–has crafted a career that
is anything but ordinary.
He enjoys a longstanding duo partnership with the acclaimed pianist
Awadagin Pratt. He travels the globe appearing with leading orchestras
and top conductors, including Michael Tilson Thomas and Itzhak Perlman.
And he has twice performed with the National Orchestra De Cuba in Havana,
including a date this past summer with frequent chamber partners pianist
Navah Perlman and violinist Giora Schmidt.
A graduate of the Peabody
Institute and the Juilliard School, Bailey was well on his way to a
successful career as a concert cellist before he finished his education.
But he wasn't particularly challenged. "When I first started performing,
in my early 20s, I was being asked nine times out of ten to play one
of the same three concertos," he says. "But very early on,
I decided not to follow what others were doing, but to follow my own
path."
He didn't have long to wait.
In 1997, TV producer Tom Fontana heard Bailey play at Peabody and asked
him to score an episode of the Emmy-winning show Homicide: Life on
the Streets. Fontana wanted a virtuoso piece. "That got the
juices in my brain going," says Bailey, known as an engaging and
powerful performer. "'Now, what would I play for something like
that?' I wondered. It really got me excited."
The next year Fontana created
Oz, the hard-hitting HBO prison series, and gave Bailey an on-screen
role. In the first season, Bailey's character, Eugene Dobbins (prisoner
#97D403) performed a Bach cello piece, harpooned a violist with his
end pin, ate a glass-tainted salad, and died horribly in a prison riot.
Fans adored him.
Last year, participants
on the HBO online forum persuaded producers to resurrect some of the
dead to guest-narrate a few episodes. That led to "Sonata de Oz,"
a recent episode in which Bailey used obscure cello parts to score six
short segments. The response from viewers was overwhelming. "It
just goes to show that if you bring great music to an unusual setting,
but hold that music up as high as you can, then you can make a difference,"
Bailey says. "Now, at almost every concert, someone comes up to
me and says, 'I had no idea about classical music and the cello before
hearing you on HBO and decided to come to my first concert tonight.'"
These side projects have
given Bailey a greater appreciation for the standard concertos and reinvigorated
him as a player. "I adore doing these unusual things and then going
back out and having that in my psyche when playing a rococo variation
again," he says. "It puts things into perspective."
These days, Bailey—who
lives with his sculptor wife Margarita Cabrera and young son Mateo in
the desert outside of El Paso—is preparing to bring world-class
music to a place regarded by many in the classical music world as off
the beaten path. In January, he returns as director of the respected
El Paso Chamber Music Festival. "People are pleasantly shocked
when they get to El Paso," he says of those who don't expect a
thriving classical music scene in a remote border town. "This is
the ultimate dream for a musician to give back to a community and feel
like they're making an impact."
Does Bailey harbor any ambition
to return to acting?
"I don't want to be
an actor, I don't want to be a rock star," he concludes, "I
want to be a classical cellist, but I had to stop thinking like a classical
cellist to accomplish that. And I take tremendous responsibility for
what I bring to that undertaking."
The El Paso Chamber Festival
runs January 9–18. Visit www.Zuillbailey.com for details.
