Zuill Bailey

Zuill Bailey

'It takes half a shaker of pepper and Tabasco sauce in my pocket to make me go, "Mmmm, pretty good taste,"' brags Zuill Bailey, an El Paso, Texas-based cellist whose approach to performing Beethoven is as fiery as his culinary palette. While the effusive and imposing musician is primarily focused on the great classics of solo and chamber music literature, he likes to spice things up a bit from time to time.

In recent seasons, Bailey has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Ravinia Festival performing works by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and he frequently shares the stage with such luminaries as Itzhak Perlman and Awadagin Pratt. This past September, he travelled to Russia for a series of concerts with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra as the soloist for Tchaikovsky's celebrated Rococo Variations.

But the 34-year-old was also the soloist for the Cuban premiere of Victor Herbert's second Cello Concerto in Havana. He has even appeared on the HBO prison drama Oz, where he portrayed a crazed orchestral musician who used the spike of his cello to carry out a homicide. By anyone's assessment, this is a far cry from the sanctity of the proscenium.

'We all have to do our part and bring this kind of music to people and make it accessible,' Bailey says. 'You can be in every single person's home and show them the best. In this grizzly environment, there's a rose growing: someone's sitting there playing unaccompanied Bach. People are not going to watch Oz and go to Carnegie Hall the next night, necessarily. So maybe this is the ultimate outreach.'

'I have made it a mission to infiltrate, to go out and meet with people in communities '

Since appearing in Oz, Bailey has linked up with cable television in El Paso and now does a show called Bach on Demand. 'They bring in all these kids and I teach a course while playing through a whole Bach suite. It is literally available on demand for every single school in the El Paso area; a teacher can just pull up this show by turning on the television.'

In addition to these virtual performances, Bailey also performs actual concert programs in many schools throughout the year. He is a professor of cello at the University of Texas at El Paso and artistic director of chamber music promoter Pro-Musica, also based in El Paso, where he lives with his wife Margarita Cabrera - a sculptor and installation artist - and their two young sons.

The El Paso Pro-Musica produces the annual El Paso Chamber Music Festival, a month-long immersion in classical music that takes place every January. This year's highlights include appearances by the Juilliard String Quartet and the Kalichstein Laredo Robinson Trio. Community outreach is also a core component of the festival, which features an array of free concerts including a noontime series coyly named 'Bach's Lunch'.

A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School, Bailey began his musical education much more humbly but with some significant and inspirational mentors nearby. 'I am the product of growing up in the Washington DC area where Rostropovich was our local cellist,' he recalls. 'Classical music was accessible to us and it was entertaining. I have made it a mission to infiltrate, to go out and meet with people in communities. I do it to excess because I really know how big a difference it makes.

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