Zuill Bailey isn’t a real murderer; he just plays one on TV. The thirty-one-year-old cellist spends most of his time giving conventional concerts around the country and serving as artistic director of the El Paso Pro Musica Chamber Festival and Series in Texas. But people who ignore classical music may recognize him from his several appearances as an inmate in the HBO prison series Oz. Bailey took that job because it gave him a chance to play music for a new audience, if only in one-minute snippets. As for the old audience, Bailey loves to spring fresh works, new and old, on us, just in case we start to tire of the small basic cello repertoire. His debut recording with pianist Simone Dinnerstein on Delos is a good example: It opens with one of the few complete recordings of Francoeur’s Sonata in E, and continues with the Bach G-Major Cello Suite, demonstrating that Bailey can hold his own in the instrument’s core repertoire. Then come three solid pieces hovering just at the edge of familiarity: Beethoven’s Magic Flute Variations, Mendelssohn’s Variations concertantes, and Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise. Bailey tops this off with his own transcription of Vieuxtemps’s Souvenir d’Amérique, a rather wacky set of variations on Yankee Doodle.

    Bailey has also recently recorded the brief Korngold concerto as part of ASV’s series devoted to that composer, and he has a disc coming out on STIL that mingles well-known sonatas of Brahms and Debussy with a new work by Philip Lasser. Bailey swears that he’s not just biding his time until he’s well enough known to be taken seriously in the Elgar concerto; he actually gets a kick out of all this unusual music.

    Bailey had his first run-in, literally, with the cello when he was four, racing down a hallway after a symphony concert. He decided on the spot that the shattered instrument was the sort of thing he wanted to play, and his parents, both of whom are musicians, agreed. Over the next several years, he studied with Loran Stephenson, Stephen Kates, and Joel Krosnick, graduating from the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School. It was Kates who introduced him to the Francoeur sonata; Kates had picked it up from his teacher, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Bailey cites the latter’s recording of two movements of it as a tremendous inspiration to him.

    “When I first looked at the score, it just seemed like five nice, separate pieces, perfect and beautiful but in a suite format, ending with a gigue,” Bailey says. “But then I heard the Piatigorsky recording, and it’s electrifying, first this beautiful Adagio cantabile, and then an Allegro that’s fast and alive. That’s how it’s marked, Allegro vivo. So when I recorded it, I didn’t want it to sound quaint. I wanted first and foremost for people to get to know the sound of the cello through the course of this sonata. It evolves, from the Adagio cantabile, then all of a sudden, pow! You get the Allegro, then it goes back to a gavotte, then a slow song, Largo cantabile, then it gallops out in the end. I love the piece, and I think people are pleasantly surprised when they hear it.”

    Bailey has no qualms about playing this 18th-century music on a modern cello with piano accompaniment. “People go to extremes today, and they either don’t play this music at all, or they play it in a very specific style they think was appropriate for that time. I look at Francoeur a different way, and this is how I come at my Bach, too: I think you’ve got to be sincere and honest in your approach, and approach these pieces in a modern way, with vibrato, and if you have more tension in the sound you can pull and tug people more. I play Bach with feeling but sincerity, and I try not to let myself get in the way. My individuality will come through without having to hit people over the head with romanticism.”

    In the end, Bailey is an admitted sensualist. “I love beautiful sounds,” he says. “The cello is a very comforting instrument to play as well as listen to, and I just want to hear gorgeous sounds when I play music.” He’s even a bit of a hedonist, judging from his love of the Vieuxtemps Souvenir d’Amérique, a virtuoso vehicle rather than a piece of lovely music. “It’s terribly fun to play,” he says. “One of the things I love about classical music is the more you play these pieces, the more you uncover about them, even a silly piece like this. It’s meant to be a joke. Vieuxtemps came over here on his first US tour and was determined to be successful, and in the late 1800s it was a fad to take a famous theme and write variations on it. So he composed, in his Paganiniesque, Vieuxtemps way, a piece that would start off in a cadenza format and confuse the hell out of people. They’d say, ‘What is he doing?’ Once he got them in that frame of mind, he would turn to the polar opposite of seriousness, the Yankee Doodle theme. I grew up with my older sister playing pieces like this on the violin, and I’m always looking for interesting pieces to add to the cello literature in transcription format. Several years ago I had to come up with an American-themed piece and I thought it would be very funny to transcribe this. It took a little work, because I don’t have an E string, and so for that and other reasons the cello has to do things differently, chords have to be inverted, and staccatos and pizzicatos are in different places. You have to transcribe it and play it in a way that shows how a cello can shine.”

    Bailey’s own cello is a 1693 Matteo Goffriller, formerly owned by Mischa Schneider of the Budapest Quartet. As Bailey has discovered, a cello can be like a shoe that’s been worn a long time by somebody else—and this cello conformed to long-time wear by Schneider. “I can tell, based on particular notes in the bass, that this has been used as a quartet instrument to the extreme,” he says. “You can hear it in the Bach; when I hit particular notes on the C string it opens up like a pipe organ, because it adjusted itself heavily to Mischa Schneider being the core of the Budapest Quartet. And performers conform to their instruments as well. Schneider used this for at least 30 years of his career, so over time they conformed to each other. I find that this cello is pretty much as good as I am, in the sense that it magnifies what I do and I can really . . . there’s a fine line between pushing myself on it and letting it do its own thing, as opposed to some Strads I’ve tried. The Strads are glorious, but when you play one, it almost plays you because it’s pure gold. After about 30 minutes you realize, ‘I have to get used to gold, because that’s all that’s going to come out.’ I think a lot of cellists are drawn to instruments like this Matteo Goffriller because they aren’t pure gold; they have a lot of grit and growl in their sound. Cellists don’t necessarily always want to be pretty; they want to have texture and variety. When you push through on the lower register, you don’t necessarily want it to sound like a bell.

    “So my adaptation has basically been familiarizing myself with this cello. It’s extraordinarily large; it was made in 1693, and back then a lot of cellos were made as church basses. Stradivari after that redid the cello mold and made it smaller; his cellos were much easier to play, and these early guys saw his genius and started cutting their instruments down. This one was never cut down, and it’s unique because the bottom of the cello is quite large, but the top is just large enough, or small enough, that it’s easily playable. I think that it’s got a unique sound. On numerous occasions, people have come up to me and remarked that I sound so much like Mischa Schneider, not knowing I was playing his instrument. Once I was playing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a woman came down from one of the offices and asked what kind of cello I was playing. I told her, and she said ‘I knew it, because my desk hasn’t rumbled like that since the last time it was in here!’ I think this cello is a magnificent solo instrument because it has that unique voice. And it’s great for chamber music, because the way it’s built, if I’m playing a Haydn trio, or other lower things, I can really hold the structure of the piece together with this instrument, and then when I have a solo line that needs to come through, the cello sound really cuts through and sings.”

    Bailey is extremely personable, as you might expect of somebody whose first name pretty much rhymes with “cool” (“Zuill” is a Scots-Irish surname that shifted forward in Bailey’s family over the past few hundred years). Yet he is usually photographed in black, and he can easily assume the sinister expression of a handsome young Mafioso (you can see several shots and find other information at www.zuillbailey.com). So his casting as an inmate on Oz doesn’t seem too unlikely—except that Bailey landed the role because of his playing, not his looks. “I was doing all these solo concerts and began being approached to represent the cello in unusual ways,” he explains. “It’s always been my goal to be a cellist, but I started feeling that maybe I could bring this great music to people in ways they would be more comfortable listening to it, since people are creatures of habit and a lot of them aren’t going to break away from the TV to go to a concert. So I began accepting some of the more unusual invitations. For instance, in Baltimore I played on the soundtrack to the TV show Homicide: Life on the Streets; I did the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia, and some Paganini, and then I was subsequently asked to play a cellist on that HBO TV show.”

    Bailey rejects the notion that such TV gigs should be regarded as slumming. “It’s important to play this music just about anywhere I can,” he says, “because most people who hear the best classical music, even in the strangest places, will always come back to it. They’ll say, ‘Gosh, I didn’t know how great this could be!’ So I take great pride and responsibility in presenting the cello and the music that really represents the cello as a fantastic instrument anywhere I can. I try to choose things that would intrigue the lay listener as well as people who go to the concert hall every night. The TV people gave me full responsibility for the music; they’d say, ‘You’ve got 38 seconds here, one minute and 10 seconds there. Here’s what’s happening on screen; you come up with the music.’ So, knowing that you have to play something while someone is creeping through a hospital in the dark with a scalpel, what do you do? I thought Popper’s Dance of the Gnomes would be very creepy and spooky and fun. It was a great success for me, because people would ask me where they could get the music. That gets back to the Delos record, and why I put it together like I did. I wanted to intrigue anybody who saw one of those endeavors of mine, and I wanted this cello record to be accessible to them. And at the same time I wanted people who have all the cello recordings known to mankind to be intrigued by the repertoire.”

    He insists that even on Oz, his principal function is as a musician. “If you saw that show, you’d know I didn’t act,” he says, even while relishing the role. “They present me backstage at a concert, and I’m looming in the wings with my cello, getting ready to play, and the concertmaster is there, too, warming up. He must have done something to offend me, because I run up and harpoon him with my cello; I lift it up and poke the endpin through him. What a great idea! Take the concertmaster out just before showtime! So in the prison scenes they show me playing the cello senza endpin, because that was the murder weapon.” Having said all that, Bailey emphasizes, “Bringing this kind of music to unique audiences is my goal, but, while doing that, keeping it elevated and helping classical music come across in a classy way.”

    While Bailey is determined to bring music to fresh audiences, he has to take care to keep himself fresh, too. “I spend most of my year playing solo cello things,” he says. “I find myself playing the same things a lot, the warhorses, so I constantly search for and go out of my way to find works that are interesting, works that maybe upon hearing them another cellist might go out and learn himself or herself and add them to the repertoire.” He hopes that might happen with Korngold’s 1948 Cello Concerto, drawn from his score for the film Deception. “The Korngold Violin Concerto is a phenomenal piece, so once I heard that I had to look at the Cello Concerto,” he says. “It’s only 12 minutes long, and it’s really a neat, beautiful work. It’s not a huge investment in the sense that it’s short, it’s very easy listening, it takes you on a journey left and right to different places in your thoughts as a performer, and then it’s over. You don’t sit there and gasp and say, ‘I’ve got two more movements!’ It finishes perfectly.” Along with the Korngold, Bailey has a short list of concertos he’d like to be played more, by himself and his colleagues: the Ibert (with wind ensemble), the Mozart-Szell (“a transcription of a flute concerto Szell did for Feuermann, and nobody knows about it”), Herbert 2, Kabalevsky 1, and Saint-Saëns 2. Bailey describes each of these works with such terms as “gorgeous” and “fantastic” and “a great piece seldom heard.” Lest you think he’s a sucker for the obscure, Bailey is careful to proselytize just for works he can seriously vouch for; incorporating just these few concertos into the mainstream would make a tremendous difference, he believes: “If a few cellists would take a chance to play these in public, we could kick the repertoire open.”

    These concertos have all been recorded from time to time, but not the Cello Sonata of Philip Lasser, the next work with which Bailey hopes to expand the repertoire. Bailey is including it on a recital disc with music of Brahms and Debussy, and he says there’s good reason for such programming. “Philip Lasser is a wonderful composer who is of French descent, and he is heavily influenced by Debussy and Brahms,” he says. “He feels this is where his colors and thoughts evolve from. A year and a half ago, I commissioned this sonata, and upon doing that, I was then asked to record it in conjunction with the other two composers and pieces that inspired him. I’m kind of a big fan of recital discs, as the Delos record shows. I don’t necessarily want to play or hear an entire disc of Brahms. I enjoy going to recitals, where you get an interesting variety of music and you can compare things. So this is very much a recital disc, starting with the Debussy Sonata, then Lasser, and finally Brahms. Each piece has a different sound, but a common inspiration draws them together. I feel it more than I can explain it; at the opening, the Lasser Sonata evolves the same way as the Brahms E-Minor, and then it becomes Impressionistic in spots like the Debussy.”

    Bailey takes a similar approach to programming the El Paso Pro Musica Chamber Festival. “I’m a big fan of the warhorses, but I’m also a fan of exploring the works of the great composers that are underplayed,” he says. “We also have commissioned works. So I just try to take all the repertoire that’s spinning in my dreams, and the personalities coming to the festival, and then weave them together to make programs that would showcase performers, composers, and maybe some theme.”

    The cellist resists the notion that he might ever play a work, new or old, that he doesn’t particularly like or connect to, but do it for the good of the culture, or the composer, or to fill out a CD. Yet, he says that the music he doesn’t connect to this year may move him in the future. “In my maturation process, a lot of pieces I didn’t understand or take the time to understand in the past, I find them much more approachable now,” he says. “That’s teaching me to keep all the doors open and experiment with different kinds of music. I do try to push the boundaries back enough that it doesn’t stretch me too far, but enough that it keeps me reaching. It’s a difficult balance, because if you don’t understand something, you’re going to sound like you don’t understand it when you play it. So there are many pieces I practice that I don’t perform.” Bailey won’t reveal what those pieces are, except to say, “The whole study of Bach in general is endless, and it was a real leap to record even one of the suites because of the fact that every time I play the cello my Bach sounds very different. But I don’t want to put up brick walls and corner myself into never taking a stand on Bach. I kept fluctuating—Should I do it? Should I not? I’ll be more ready next week; I’ll be more ready in two years. But I can say that for the rest of my life. Then, by the time I think I’m ready, I won’t be able to play the cello anymore. There’s just a point where you have to walk onto the playing field with it and see where it sits, and stand behind wherever that is, and then move on.”

    This article originally appeared in Issue 27:2 (Nov/Dec 2003) of Fanfare Magazine.