Short Resume

Pianist/Composer Bakriges Speaks About Performance Opportunities

CHRISTOPHER BAKRIGES WANTS NEW AUDIENCES TO HEAR HIS MUSIC

Christopher Bakriges lived in Detroit for the first twenty years of his life. His experiences in the Motor City fed his desire to artistically communicate with diverse constituencies. “I operated on multiple levels culturally. We lived for a time a stone’s throw from the original Motown Studios. I crossed many borders, culturally, racially, and socially, to live and perform. It showed me that not only Detroit matters everywhere but that I carry my Detroit-ness within me wherever I go.”

Nearly all the big musical legends played Detroit. The best in the universe, whether in a major auditorium or a chittlin’ circuit bar passed through like they were gunslingers. “It was truly a conservatory of the streets,” Bakriges remembers. His first performing and recording opportunities were in that city. Artists like Sun Ra and David Murray alum Jaribu Shahid, Tanni Tabbal, and Motown saxophonist Kasuku Mafie [Norris Patterson] were nothing but encouraging.

His path to music as a career, however, was not a direct one. Both Bakriges’ aunt and uncle were professional opera singers. His father was determined that his Greek American son studied law instead of music, even though he was in elite artistic class by the time he graduated Finney high school. The family feared he would struggle to make a living as a musician. “I earned degrees in the liberal arts at the University of Detroit (now Detroit Mercy). I don’t regret a moment of it. But my passion for music outweighed most anything else,” he recalls. “So I earned two other degrees in musicology and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan in Connecticut and York in Toronto. I let everything wash over me. Ethnomusicology allowed me to understand music in culture and music as culture – and my work with Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Nadi Qamar, Jimmy Giuffre, Billy Taylor, Jaki Byard, Fred Simmons, and Oscar Peterson allowed me to cut across the fertile ground of contemporary world music, creative improvisation, and nearly the entire spectrum of jazz history.”

Not long after returning to the U.S. from Canada he began lecturing at Elms College Massachusetts and averaged playing out 5 nights a week in at least three different states. For the last ten years he's performed 170 shows a year and has played on two dozen albums. “It’s been a wonderful and exhausting time,” he says. But surprisingly, and despite only modest commercial success, Bakriges has begun to feel more artistic freedom in both his academic role and his performance schedule. His recent headline appearances include the Institute on Pedagogies of World Music Theories at the University of Colorado in Boulder, both the Hartford and New Haven International Jazz Festival in Connecticut, New York’s storied University Of The Streets and the Museum of Natural History, artist Fran Bull’s Gallery In The Field in Vermont, the Ochre Point Festival in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as the International Society of Improvised Music at the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver in Colorado. Bakriges was also a regular at Pink’s Alley in Manchester, Vermont until its closing late last year, performing there with the late Stax/Truth recording artist Sandra Wright. Chris co-leads the Oikos Ensemble, a Cleveland-based world jazz group that traverses ethnic, jazz, and chamber music. Oikos concertizes mostly in churches, seminaries, and spiritual centers around the U.S. “I love performing the events that are interdisciplinary, the festivals that look right across the spectrum of arts and culture,” he says. “I’m not alone in these endeavors. There are a lot of role models like Paul Winter, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Lloyd, Billy Harper, Jay Hoggard, David Darling, Karl Berger, and the group Oregon. These are people who are not only great musicians but who also serve as missionaries for what music can do for people’s lives,” says Bakriges.

Looking for the proper opportunities in which to present this work is a consistent theme for Bakriges, now living in Vermont and commuting regularly around the U.S. His music needs to be more broadly discovered. As he puts it, “I want my music to help people. I figure that if I approach life at a hundred percent, the windows of opportunity always arise.”