Biography
Boston-based trumpeter Peter Kenagy is active professionally as a player, composer, scholar and educator.
Peter Kenagy (Ken-NAY-Gee) is a bandleader, recording artist, freelancer, session musician, and collaborator, with recordings available on Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp. Follow him with the tag @pete_kenagy.
Pete established the Mad Monkfish Jazz Orchestra in 2019, an octet which appears monthly at the Central Square Cambridge jazz venue 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 written music is collected in the following published volumes: Peter Kenagy Omnibus (2021); Peter Kenagy Nonet Music: forty-eight arrangements for jazz band (2021); Peter Kenagy Music for Jazz Nonet (2022); Music for Jazz Nonet (2023) Peter Music for Jazz Octet (2024); Music for Jazz Octet (2025).
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 as a recording as a sheet music.
Kenagy’s DVD and Vimeo release titled Penmanship: Fifty-One Short Music Videos (2021) is a collection of short whimsical performances by Peter on piano and DAW featuring moving images which were originally aired on Instagram.
Kenagy has made five albums of his small-group music; Little Machines (2005), Double Happiness (2006), Space Western (2006), Coolidge (2007), and Standard Model (2017).
Dr. Kenagy lectures on jazz history, improvisation and theory, and other music history 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.
BM and MM, New England Conservatory; DMA, University of Illinois. 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.
