Biography

Boston-based trumpeter Dr. Peter Kenagy is active professionally as a player, composer, scholar and educator.

Peter Kenagy is a distinguished bandleader, recording artist, freelancer, session musician, and collaborator, with recordings available on Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp. 

Kenagy established the Mad Monkfish Jazz Orchestra in 2019, which appears monthly at the Central Square Cambridge jazz club The Mad Monkfish. The band features outstanding players from the area playing his original music and arrangements of jazz classics. 

Kenagy has taught at Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and College of the Holy Cross.

Kenagy's compositions are collected in three published volumes: (1) Peter Kenagy Nonet Music: forty-eight arrangements for jazz band, (2) Peter Kenagy Omnibus, and (3) Peter Kenagy Music for Jazz Nonet.

His 22-minute piece for solo piano, Stuart Little: suite for piano after E.B. White's tale, was recorded by Carmen Staaf in 2022, and is available on Bandcamp. 

The music videos from Kenagy's compositions on Penmanship, Fifty-One Short Music Videos (2021), are available on Vimeo.

Kenagy has released five albums of his small-group music; Little Machines (2005), Double Happiness (2006), Space Western (2006), Coolidge (2007), and Standard Model (2017).

Kenagy lectures on jazz history, improvisation, and Black American music topics. His doctoral dissertation on the music of George Russell won the Nicholas Temperley Prize for Excellence in a Dissertation in 2009 from the musicology department at the University of Illinois. He has contributed writing to publications including American National Biography, Jazz Perspectives, American Music, and the Society for American Music. He has served as conductor, clinician and adjudicator in regional collegiate and secondary school festivals and educational residencies.