Zuill Bailey says he’ll bring classical music anywhere. And he does it all the time as artistic director of the Mesa Arts Center’s Classical Music Inside Out series.
The Grammy-award winning cellist plays in schools, hospitals, retirement homes and more — and brings a series of world-renowned artists each season to do the same. The goal, he says, is to break down the wall between audience and performer.
The last show of their 2026 season is Thursday night featuring jazz bassists Christian McBride and Edgar Meyer. The Show spoke with Bailey more about the series.
If you go
When: Thursday, April 9, 2026, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Virginia G. Piper Repertory Theater at Mesa Arts Center, 1 E Main St., Mesa, AZ 85201
Full conversation
GILGER: Let's being with a little bit just about you. I mean, you're a Grammy Award-winning cellist. I assume you played this instrument most of your life and it sounds like dedicated your life to it in some ways. What about it attracted you initially?
BAILEY: Ah, the feeling of it. The feeling of the cello. This is my 50th year playing the cello.
GILGER: My goodness, yeah.
BAILEY: It started when I was 4.
GILGER: What is it about classical music in particular that has attracted you, driven you, kept you kind of inspired?
BAILEY: I believe that classical music and what it takes to listen to it, to experience it gives us the tools to have a better life. Especially when it's taught to young people. It teaches us how to work well with each other. It teaches on how to problem solve, to take and accept criticism, but also to have tremendous hope.
It also gives us an X factor in expression that the greatest fear of human beings is what? Well, No. 2 is death, but No. 1 is speaking in public or doing something expressive in front of your peers or the public. And classical music really gives us kind of the callus. That sounds negative, but I mean the muscle tone, let's say, to stand up and to continue to stand up as life kind of knocks us around.
The sophistication of classical music also, I think, is one of the things that continues to make it the word classic. It's timeless. Everyone says the same things about classical music, but classical music's not going away. In fact, quite frankly, I think it's getting even greater.
GILGER: Yeah, I'm sure you do have calluses though, from playing the cello. [LAUGHS] You have said, and I'm quoting you here back to yourself. So tell me more about this idea and what you do with Classical Music Inside Out. You said you want to shock people into the beauty of classical music. Did you feel shocked at some moment in your childhood by it?
BAILEY: Well, sure, because we are sponges in our younger years and at some point we kind of close off and do what we've always done. But through music and through education, those young years, if we're brought exposure to a lot of things, that becomes the norm. And so I have always had music and art and expression and an outlet through these kinds of things in my life since age 3 or 4.
And so, I now expect that to be the case moving forward. And I try to bring that to kids in concerts, in their schools, young people's concerts. I actually go to hospitals to play for young people or older people that are in need. No one wants to be in a hospital. But the beauty of music, whether it's even just a distraction, is quite something.
I'll take it anywhere. So the shock and awe is, why is that so beautiful? And what's he doing?
GILGER: Right? What's he doing?
BAILEY: What's he doing? Whether he's in a library, a mall, a school, a hospital. And every time, handfuls of people come and ask me, "What's going on? Where can I hear you more? And where can I see this more?" And I invite them to the Mesa Arts Center.
GILGER: Right. So tell us about the kind of origins of this program. You've been doing it for a very long time now. Classical Music Inside Out, where you do exactly what you're describing there. You bring the music into the community in sort of unprecedented ways, try to break down that wall, as you call it, between the audience and the performance.
Where did this come from?
BAILEY: Yeah, well, the Mesa Arts center is definitely a leader. I think that most — a lot of presenting organizations in the old days would just put up a poster of someone attractive playing the violin or piano or this or that and expect people to go. But the fact is, people go to hear their friends.
They go to hear something familiar. We look at the Internet and we think we know these people. But the fact is, hand to hand, being in person is in my — well, it's the way I live my life. So what we did from 2013 on is we built our audiences to be ready for the concert.
So the artists come in days before the event, usually on a Thursday night, and they hit every place we can dream up to bring classical music or jazz or crossover or whatever we dream up, and make it highly personal. So when those artists walk on stage, those young people know them and are friends with them, and there's a cheering of it going on that's so exciting and so not the norm.
And that's what my hope was, was to tear that wall down between the audience and the musicians so both could feel.
GILGER: So, I have to ask about doing this in schools. I have little kids. And I'm like imagining what they would say or ask or think about this and seeing it in real life, having really not experienced it in that way before. What do kids say? What's the reaction like?
BAILEY: Well, I tell my personal story, is when I was 4 or 5 years old, I would go to a concert and I would be wiggling around and my mother would pinch my leg, and I'd say, "Why are you doing that?" And she'd say, "You have to be very quiet." And I said, "Why do I have to be quiet?"
And she said, "This is acoustic music. And with acoustic music, the magic is in the soft stuff, and you don't want to miss the magic."
GILGER: I gotta use that next time.
BAILEY: Yes. And I said, "No, I don't want to miss the magic." And then I just sit there as quietly as possible. And she said to me many times, "Can you hear them?" And I said, "I can." She goes, "They can hear you, too." Meaning, don't distract.
GILGER: Does it work?
BAILEY: It did work. And I've gotten up to about 1,200 elementary school kids and gotten them all to be as quiet as deafening silence and play pieces for them. And even made them shut their eyes to make them realize the power of using one less sense.
I think music is much more than just entertainment. It really is a health care system that we're avoiding or we need to expose more of.
GILGER: Right. I mean, you talked about bringing it to hospitals, right?
BAILEY: Because vibrations, frequency. I mean, this is everything from massage therapy to why we're alive.
GILGER: Really powerful stuff. Is there a moment that sticks out to you in a hospital, in a school, in a nursing home — something like that that you'll never forget doing this work?
BAILEY: Two quick moments. The reason why I play in hospitals is that my son was born under duress. He was born in 2002. Right after being born, he was taken to the intensive care unit. They wouldn't allow me to touch him. I couldn't get near him, but I could play music for him. So I played my own cello music for him.
And I noticed immediately how it affected the doctors, the nurses, the other parents, but most importantly, my own son. And his oxygen went up, and his heart rate settled. And I felt like, this is truly magic. And he ended up being OK and great. He's 23 now. Everything's fine.
The second one was that I was playing the other day, and a gentleman on the third row began crying in the middle of my first piece.
And I stopped and I said, "Sir, are you OK?" And his wife leaned to him, and he leaned back, and she said, "My husband is deaf, but he can hear your cello."
GILGER: Oh, that's amazing.
BAILEY: And he'd been deaf for 25 years.
GILGER: He could feel it.
BAILEY: He could feel it. And that's what I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with the obvious thing at all in life. It has to do with the subtleties and how you make people feel. And whatever was happening, it was shaking something in his body, in his ears, in his head, in his heart that made him react and start crying.
GILGER: You're giving me goosebumps. All right, that is Zuill Bailey, artistic director of the Classical Music Inside Out series at the Mesa Arts Center joining us, a Grammy-winning cellist as well. Thank you so much, Zuill, for coming in. I really appreciate it.
BAILEY: Great pleasure.
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