Associate Conductor
21st Season with Seraphic Fire
Los Angeles, CA
James K. Bass, Grammy award-winning conductor and singer, is Professor and Director of Choral Studies at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. James is on the faculty and serves as the Program Director for the Professional Choral Institute at the Aspen Music Festival. He is the Associate Conductor for the Miami-based ensemble Seraphic Fire and is the Artistic Director of the Long Beach Camerata Singers.
Bass is an active soloist and ensemble artist. In 2017 he made his Cleveland Orchestra solo debut singing with Franz Welser-Möst in Miami and in Severance Hall, Cleveland. In 2020 he was awarded a Grammy in the category of Best Choral Performance for the Naxos recording of The Passion of Yeshua by Richard Danielpour. For the recording, he served as Chorusmaster and vocal soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. He was the featured baritone soloist on the Grammy-nominated recording Pablo Neruda: The Poet Sings with fellow singer Lauren Snouffer, conductor Craig Hella-Johnson and the Grammy-winning ensemble Conspirare. He is one of 13 singers on the Grammy-nominated disc A Seraphic Fire Christmas and appears on CD recordings on the Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, Albany, and Seraphic Fire Media labels.
Bass was selected by the master conductor of the Amsterdam Baroque Soloists, Ton Koopman, to be one of only 20 singers for a presentation of Cantatas by J. S. Bach in Carnegie Hall and was an auditioned member of Robert Shaw’s workshop choir at Carnegie. During the summer of 2011, he co-founded the Professional Choral Institute. In its inaugural year of recording, Seraphic Fire and PCI received a Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance for their recording of Johannes Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem. In 2017 Seraphic Fire and UCLA launched a new educational initiative entitled the Ensemble Artist Program that aims to identify and train the next generation of high-level ensemble singers.
