Zuill Bailey Returns to Mesa Arts Center as an Exuberant Grammy Winner

Three-time Grammy winning cellist with local roots talks about experience of winning music’s highest honor

By Mike Saucier
MESA – Zuill Bailey is still processing walking the red carpet at the Grammy Awards, which would have been thrilling enough. The exuberance got even more intense when he actually won, not one, not two, but three Grammy awards.
Bailey, the 44-year-old artistic director of Mesa Arts Center’s Classical Music Inside Out Series, won for his cello performance on “Michael Daugherty: Tales of Hemingway, American Gothic & Once Upon a Castle (Live).” Bailey received Grammy Awards for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Classical Compendium.
His 14-year-old son Mateo accompanied him to the event at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday. His son, of course, was in awe of all that was around him.
Bailey said his son told him, “Someone just told me to pinch myself. I don’t want to because I might wake up.”
“The cool part, beyond all the obvious, is the part you don’t know is going to happen,” Bailey said. “When they gave the award, he was with me, he was filming it, he was screaming and he got to come backstage with me and experience something that not many people get to experience. That thing that happens behind the scenes where you see all the stars hanging out with their trophies and everyone’s kind of glazed over at what just happened.”
His son naturally approached some of the dozens of stars backstage for photos, Bailey said. Of course, with the generation gap being as it is, son had to explain to father who some of the musicians were.
Bailey, who lives in El Paso, is in Mesa for a week of engagements and performances at Mesa Arts Center, the Arizona Museum of Natural History, Arizona State University, Highland Elementary School and Mesa Express Library.
“The collaboration between Mesa Arts Center and Zuill Bailey is one that we’re extremely proud of,” said Randy Vogel, Director of Theaters and Operations at Mesa Arts Center. “He is an incredibly talented and generous artist with an unbelievable ability to make classical music accessible to everyone. We’re so pleased for him to receive this recognition, and look forward to continuing our work with him through the Classical Music Inside Out Series.”
Mesa Arts Center’s Classical Music Inside Out Series offers both free and ticketed immersive music experiences, wherein master musicians share their passion for music, give informal insights and significantly deepen the listening experience in settings that range from classrooms and stages to hospitals and care centers.
When Frontdoors caught up with him, he had just flown in the previous night.
The whole experience, Bailey said, was “exhilarating, overwhelming.”
It was his first time attending the Grammys show and it was the first time he was nominated.
“The CD won CD of the best classical compendium, the piece itself won, and my performance of the piece won,” he said. “So it was an avalanche of positivity and it’s absolutely indescribable.”
“The electricity and the voltage, it is so over the top,” Bailey said. “Leaving my hotel to when the limo dropped me off on the red carpet, when those doors open…it’s a different planet – photographers, press, adrenaline, you kind of go into shock and the next thing you know you’re at the end of this red carpet which is very long so you’ve walked like two, three football fields.”
Bailey added: “When was the last time you had an adrenaline attack that lasted 12 hours?…That’s what this was.”
He will spend the next year doing what he loves: teaching, performing and directing. Now he’ll do it all as a three-time Grammy winner, Bailey said, “Obviously this is a game changer. It’s going to change the next chapter.”
Bailey is the artistic director of El Paso Pro-Musica, the Sitka Summer Music Festival/Series and Cello Seminar, artistic director of the Mesa Arts Center and professor of cello at the University of Texas at El Paso.
All that, and he is an internationally renowned recording artist. His recording “Bach Cello Suites” and “Britten Cello Symphony/Sonata” went to the no. 1 spot on the Classical Billboard Charts.
“Music is healing,” Bailey said. Going into hospitals, hospices and cancer centers “is very much a mission of ours these days. The giving back is basically taking care of our own and doing it in a way that I think only music really can.”
He said: “Look, music created a platform and canvas for me as a kid to be communicative, expressive, I felt safe, I felt confident. It made me feel like a part of the bigger picture and that’s as a child. So we’re giving kids and our youth and all of those empowerments to find themselves in the best way they can be through music. Of course we take all of the same things and bring to the arts centers and the concerts.”

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