Peter Kenagy is a jazz trumpet artist, composer and bandleader, and scholar. His music has been called elegant and adventurous, both modern and rooted in tradition, with a sound all its own.
Kenagy (“Ken-NAY-gee”) has led many quarter/quintet/sextet projects, and released five albums of small group jazz music as a leader and trumpeter; Little Machines, with Jeremy Udden, alto saxophone; Jason Hunter, tenor saxophone; Adam Larrabee, guitar; Rick McLaughlin, bass; Jorge Perez-Albela, drums. Double Happiness, with Jeremy Udden, alto and tenor saxophone; Yasushi Nakamura, bass; Jorge Perez-Albela, drums. Space Western, with Adam Larrabee, guitar; Tyler Wood, organ; Garth Stephenson, bass; Ziv Ravitz, drums. Coolidge, with Carmen Staaf, piano; Kendall Eddy, bass; Austin, McMahon, drums. Standard Model, with Jeremy Udden, alto saxophone; Carmen Staaf, piano; Greg Ryan, bass; Austin McMahon, drums.
Kenagy currently leads The Mad Monkfish Jazz Orchestra, a Boston-based jazz band performing monthly at The Mad Monkfish. His more than 70 compositions and arrangements for The Mad Monkfish Jazz orchestra are published in a series of volumes, including Peter Kenagy Music for Jazz Nonet.
Other composition/recording projects include Fifty-One Short Music Videos, a collection of original instrumental songs which were recorded and posted to social media, and which include examples of creative calligraphic notation and Stuart Little: suite for piano after E.B. White’s tale, a 23-minute composition which tells the story of the mouse-like boy through a series of charming and whimsical vignettes, and which was recorded by Carmen Staaf. Published and recorded songs and sheet music from these projects are collected in the volume Peter Kenagy Omnibus, along with other original works.
As a collaborator, Kenagy has recently recorded and performed with bassist/composer Bruno Raberg’s Tentet, featuring Walter Smith III and Kris Davis, with djembefola/vocalist Sidy Maiga and The Bridge Where We Meet, fusing Malian and Senegalese music with contemporary American styles, with bassist/composer Fernando Huergo’s big band, and with many other Boston-area jazz colleagues in local venues and in recording projects.
As an educator devoted to jazz music, Kenagy has taught courses in performance, improvisation, ensembles, jazz combos and big bands, arranging and composition, jazz repertoire, jazz piano and ear training. He has been active as a festival clinician, adjudicator and presenter at conferences and seminars devoted to jazz at the secondary and collegiate level.
As a scholar of jazz music and music history, Kenagy’s writing has appeared in publications such as Jazz Perspectives, American Music, American National Biography, The Bulletin of the Society for American Music, and in liner note essays and concert reviews. His doctoral dissertation, George Russell's Jazz Workshop: The composer's style and original methods of 1956, received the Nicholas Temperley Award for Excellence in a Dissertation by the musicology faculty of the School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kenagy has lectured extensively and taught courses in music of the African Diaspora, including West African music and culture, US-based genres of spirituals, string bands, popular music of the 18th-c., blues, ragtime, gospel, early jazz, swing, R&B, Funk and Hip Hop, as well as Latin American and Afro-Latin music and culture, the history of jazz in diverse eras, and history of music in the European tradition.
Kenagy is firmly committed to supporting diversity and equity initiatives in the arts and in education, and to making the world of professional music and music education more inclusive and more accessible for people from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, and students from diverse global musical traditions.
Kenagy grew up in Seattle, Washington, and began to learn jazz music through the public school band programs and from the local jazz community. In high school and at the conservatory he had an opportunity to perform widely in the US and abroad, and to experience music and learn first-hand from many elders and jazz masters, including Lionel Hampton, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Hank Jones, J.J. Johnson, George Russell, Ray Brown, Elvin Jones, Ernestine Anderson, Benny Golson, Bob Brookmeyer, Barry Harris, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton and Steve Lacy.
Catch up with Peter: https://linktr.ee/peter_kenagy
B.M., M.M., Jazz Studies, New England Conservatory; D.M.A., University of Illinois. Professor, Berklee College of Music; Visiting Lecturer, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Former teaching positions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, College of the Holy Cross, University of Illinois. Recordings on Fresh Sound / New Talent, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music.