Eclectic Company: Classical Gas — Zuill Bailey with Navah Perlman and the St. Petersburg String Quartet

For those of you who have only taken your classical music medicinally, or because your [parent/spouse/child] dragged you to the symphony, I heartily recommend starting your classical music listening over again from scratch, beginning with the exquisitely strong and sensitive cello performances of Zuill Bailey.

I was brought up by a Dixieland jazz-loving, trumpet-blowing (and occasionally scat singing) dad, and a Broadway melody-loving, off-key car-singing mom, so I rarely heard classical music at home. Oh, sure, I took ballet lessons from Melissa Hayden at four, and as she was the prima ballerina for the New York State company at that time, it was Stravinsky and Debussy and other romantic classicists whose tunes we osmosed as we practiced our pliés and jetés and beautiful torso-stretching poses every Saturday morning at her tiny storefront school in suburban Woodmere, New York.

But when I turned six, my stylish, opera-singing Aunt Miriam decided to take charge of my musical education. On Saturday mornings, we’d take the A train from Far Rockaway to Manhattan to hear popular and avant garde classical music played extraordinarily well by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. At my age, I had no sense of either history or occasion, but my Aunt must have known how lucky we were to see and hear the maestro conduct those “Young People’s Concerts,” which were for me the centerpiece of many pleasurable outings. Fifty years later I can still remember how Bernstein laughed and thundered and questioned us and talked to us as if we were adults, even though I at least was sitting on my specially-made cushion “handbag” so I could see from a perch on my Carnegie Hall aisle seat left in the “upright” position. What I really remember best is Bernstein’s contagious excitement as he strode about the stage (and sometimes the aisles) and stopped the orchestra mid-chord so he could yell about the music they were playing, and that he wanted us to love. [25 of those Young People’s Concerts have been released on DVD. Get them and you, too, will fall in love with classical music. I swear. www.leonardbernstein.com.]

Until a few weeks ago I would probably have said there was only one other classical musician after Bernstein whose infectious enthusiasm made me want to listen for the different voicings of strings and reeds and brass instruments, or the poly-rhythms and overtones and the sweetly discordant notes of certain sound-pairings that make your ears ache until the tones resolve: That would be my hipster friend, the composer and conductor David Amram, whose own instruments of passion – French horn, flutes and recorders, dumbeks and bodhrans and tambourines and finger-snaps – are served up equally well in folk songs, jazz, and the modern classical pieces he’s written for flutist James Galway, as well as for school orchestras! [www.davidamram.com.]

Then a few weeks ago, I heard cellist Zuill Bailey do the same – at a private house concert for Banners’ patrons, where he tore through “Flight of the Bumblebee” as the punchline to a story about a dare and a successful bluff. The same charisma, the same sparks leaping from his every gesture. The next night, he did it again at a pre-public concert lecture-demonstration, where he showed us his outsized left hand, bulked up from 30+ years of fingerboard exercises, and then gave us Bach’s Prelude No 1 in G Major, urging us to watch Jamie Foxx appear to do the same in “The Soloist.” And finally, he did it in concert at Bulber Auditorium, accompanied by Navah Perlman (violinist Itzhak’s beautiful, deft, and self-effacing pianist daughter, who told me “it’s relaxing to be an accompanist for a change, and not have to be responsible or make the decisions”), and for Anton Arensky’s String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 35 – a rare piece for two cellos, violin and viola – performing with three members of the St. Petersburg String Quartet.

Between the stories and the songs, Bailey conjured up Bernstein, proselytizing for the instrument and the music he loves in purring sounds and warm laughter. Like Bernstein, Bailey has a gift for imparting even mundane information in artless-sounding stories that feel like he’s sharing special secrets instead of preaching. I know, since I hate Schubert, but by the end of the Bulber concert, I was listening to Schubert with new ears, because Bailey asked me to. [“Why do you hate Schubert?” he picked on me in the pre-concert Q&A. I wasn’t articulate, but he nailed it – because Schubert’s audiences wanted facile, teeth-itchingly sweet background tunes for their salons, and the composer/musician always goes where the patrons lead him.] And indeed, after hearing that night’s Schubert, an unusually meaty piece, “Sonata in A minor, D. 821,” I did think a little bit better of the old court card.

And what of Bailey’s sound? It’s an artfully magical caress. Bailey plays with absolute clarity, fingering precise attacks on individual notes that yet feel so smoothly sounded it’s as if they’ve been struck by a breath rather than by the placement of a finger; he flutters his wrist and the vibrato goes on forever, yet he can end it so subtly and swiftly that you’re scarcely aware of movement from one note to another; and all the while he’s teasing a warm ooze out of the cello’s mouth with seemingly effortless bow strokes. “It helps,” he said, “to have started playing when I was four.”

Whether bench-pressing all three pounds of his carbon fiber and Kevlar cello case, or showing off his relatively huge left keyboard-fingering hand, stretched and muscled from 30+ years of playing, Bailey talks about classical music as if it’s pop stuff, and soon to be as commonly heard as a teenager’s ring tone: "I'm Coming Up So You Better Get This Party Started." Maybe it soon will be. After he had channeled Bernstein for the last time, he gave us two encores at Bulber, ending solo with Bach’s “Prelude No. 3 in C Major” and the second standing ovation of the night. Beautiful. [www.zuillbailey.com].