Holmes, Krueger on Grammy nomination list
Performances by Music and Dance faculty members Christopher Krueger and Jeffrey Holmes landed them on the 48th annual Grammy Award nominations list released last week.
Krueger is a member of the Boston-based ensemble Collage New Music, which was nominated under the category, Best Small Ensemble Performance, for its recording on the Koch International Classics label of John Harbison’s Mottetti Di Montale under the baton of David Hoose. Holmes’ nomination is for his performance on the Paul Winter Consort’s recording, Silver Solstice, in the Best New Age Album category.
Krueger, a flutist, is one of only seven musicians who comprise the core of Collage New Music, whose mission is to commission, perform and record contemporary classical music. Krueger is intimately involved with the ensemble’s work of providing an arena for the union of composer, performer, and listener, through its annual series of concerts, ongoing recordings and innovative programming.
Seiji Ozawa, Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, Clark Terry and Vanessa Redgrave are among those who have appeared as guests with ensemblee. Presentations by Collage New Music have ranged from intimate chamber performances to fully-staged chamber operas and music with extensive electronic equipment. Over the past three decades, Collage New Music has given the first Boston performances of more than 200 works, including 80 world premieres. Krueger has been with Collage New Music for the past 20 years.
Mottetti Di Montale are musical settings for voice and ensemble of four books of poetry by Eugenio Montale. The poems document the poet’s intense relationship with a beloved who is mostly absent by referencing nature, history, art and urban living.
Krueger joined the Department of Music and Dance in 1999. A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, he has performed as principal flutist with the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Opera Company of Boston, Boston Ballet and Boston Musica Viva. He is currently principal flutist with the New Hampshire Symphony, Handel and Haydn Society and Boston Baroque Orchestra. He is also a member of the Bach Ensemble and the Aulos Ensemble. He was a founding member of the Emmanuel Wind Quintet--winner of the 1981 Walter W. Naumburg Award for Chamber Music.
Krueger also plays the baroque flute on which he has been a soloist at Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series and Mostly Mozart Festival; the Philadelphia Bach, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Berlin Bach and City of London Festivals; the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, as well as in France, Belgium, Italy and Poland. Krueger can be heard on the Decca, EMI, Nonesuch, Pro Arte, CRI, Telarc and Centaur recording labels.
The director of the Jazz and African American Music Studies program and the Jazz Ensemble I, Holmes just celebrated his 25th anniversary with the Department of Music and Dance.
Holmes is also a composer, trumpeter, drummer and pianist, and plays keyboards on the Grammy-nominated CD. A good measure of the outstanding work that Holmes has done with students over the years are the more than 30 Downbeat magazine awards given to undergraduate ensembles for best big band, studio orchestra, jazz soloist, combo, blues-pop and rock ensemble and best jazz arrangement. Downbeat awards are prestigious acknowledgments of the achievements of college and university-level performers.
Professor Holmes is a nationally published and commissioned composer-arranger and a recipient of multiple National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Composition Grants. Holmes has written music for Ernie Watts, Max Roach, Yusef Lateef, Doc Severinsen and Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, as well as military, college, junior and senior high school jazz, concert and marching ensembles.
During his career Holmes has performed with many well-known musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Bellson, Vanguard Orchestra, Sheila Jordan, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mathis, Mel Torme, David Goloschokin, Bob Mintzer and Slide Hampton. He has been a featured artist on the Jazz at Kennedy Center Series with the Billy Taylor Trio, performs often with the Paul Winter Consort, and is a member of the classical ensemble Solid Brass and lead trumpet in the New England Jazz Ensemble. He also leads the Jeff Holmes Big Band and is the drummer with the Amherst Jazz Orchestra.
In his “spare time” Holmes is a reviewer for the International Association of Jazz Educators’ journal and serves as guest conductor, clinician and adjudicator around the country.
Formed by Paul Winter in 1967, the Paul Winter Consort is one of the earliest exponents of world music; it combines elements from various African, Asian, and South American cultures with jazz. For more than 20 years, Living Music has been the recording vehicle for the Paul Winter Consort and Paul Winter's community of colleagues, which includes some of the world's finest jazz, classical and ethnic musicians, along with voices of wildlife.
December 24, 2005.
E-mail story to a friend
Printer-friendly version
/more talking points/
