South Florida Classical Review

James Bass opens his first season as Seraphic Fire artistic director this week with a program titled “Serenade to Music.” Photo: Jonathan Young

When James K. Bass takes the stage this week for his first concerts as artistic director of Seraphic Fire, the stellar Miami-based chamber choir, it will be the culmination of an American journey, a musical version of the Horatio Alger legend. 

Speaking from Santa Fe (where he was singing in summer concerts of the Santa Fe Desert Chorale), Bass said “I am one of the least likely people to head a major choral group and hold a professorship at UCLA.” Bass is director of choral studies at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. He has previously held teaching positions at Western Michigan University and the University of South Florida.

A native of Tampa, Florida, Bass comes from a non-artistic family background.” My father was a truck driver and my mother did not receive her high school diploma until she was forty,” he explained. Music was definitely not part of his home life. 

All of that changed when he heard a performance of the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition by the Florida Orchestra, the professional ensemble that plays concerts in multiple cities in the Tampa Bay area. He was fascinated, instantly hooked on music and determined to make it a dominant part of his life. 

He began studying and playing the double bass during his education in Hillsborough County public schools. Bass would complete high school at Interlochen Arts Academy where music was his primary focus. He would continue in the college division of the Michigan- based arts school and receive his Bachelor of Music degree. Bass returned to Tampa where he received Master of Music and Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of South Florida. A Doctorate in music from the University of Miami brought a major change in his life and musical trajectory.

At UM, Bass changed his focus from string bass to choral singing and direction, studying under Jo-Michael Scheibe. (Scheibe was director of the Florida Philharmonic Chorus which became the Master Chorale of South Florida after the orchestra’s demise.) Although Scheibe loved to do new music, he taught his students to be generalists with command of the full spectrum of the choral repertoire. Scheibe told Bass and his fellow students that somewhere in that spectrum, they will find their specialty, the music for which one will have great enthusiasm.

When Bass heard that many of his fellow students were auditioning for a new professional choir at the Church of the Epiphany, he decided to try out for Seraphic Fire. The group was named from a line in a hymn by American colonial composer William Billings. 

“I was wearing cardinal shorts and a t-shirt and sang an aria from Handel’s oratorio Jeptha,” Bass related. “I sang well.” Patrick Dupre Quigley, the group’s co-founder and artistic director, asked him to sing in the choir’s second concert. Bass’s warm, rotund bass would highlight many of the choir’s performances as featured soloist in the succeeding 23 years. Many of the students from the University of Miami and Florida International University in that initial group would graduate and move on. “I am the last man standing,” Bass jokingly said.

With the 2005-2006 season, “we converted to bringing singers beyond UM and FIU, making major adjustments and flexibility to the roster and adding more options on the venue card,” he recalled. (Today, Seraphic Fire performs concerts in Miami-Dade, Broward, Collier and Palm Beach counties.)  

His own role would increase over the years as well. Bass became chorus master and, eventually, associate conductor, helping to prepare the chorus and conduct the annual, highly popular Christmas concerts and other programs. The choir’s consistently excellent performances under Quigley and innovative programming led to nationwide touring and three Grammy nominations (for a Christmas album and the chamber version of Brahms’ German Requiem). “We now have our own bar and our own history,” Bass proudly says.

He praises the group’s signature “house sound” which he describes as “an informed sound, generally non-vibrato” as compared to the heavier sonority of German radio choirs. “You can hear cadences and phrasings,” he points out and he finds the group eagerly takes on the conductor’s individual style. In choral conducting, Bass believes “the gesture must have time for an anatomical sense of breath.”

Seraphic Fire singers praise his level of organization and the clarity of his direction. Soprano Rebecca Myers, an 11-year member of the chorus, says Bass’s “professionalism is really palpable. He displays great trust in artists.” She finds him “a master of gestures, always easy to follow.” Significantly she says his conducting “is so precise.  Every artistic choice always has a plan.” Myers found Bass’ 2024 “Midcentury Modern” program LINK particularly memorable.

Bass John Buffett, a 15-year veteran of Seraphic Fire, praises Bass’s “level of precision, heart and emotional impact.” From the time he joined the choir, Buffett notes, Bass was Quigley’s right hand but, as a fellow singer, “he knows what it is like to be in our shoes. There is a real level of trust between the choir members and James.” Buffett particularly enjoys the Christmas program tours under Bass. Despite giving as many 13 performances (including to other parts of Florida and New England), Buffett feels “James keeps it fresh and refines the music” over the course of the run. 

Among the numerous programs he has led with Seraphic Fire, Bass was especially happy about the 2019 concert that interspersed movements of Poulenc’s Mass in G with other reflective works and the aforementioned concert of mid-20^th century scores by American and Canadian composers.

Bass feels one of his most significant accomplishments has been the organization’s Ensemble Artist Program at UCLA. Formally ensconced as a joint venture between Seraphic Fire and the university in the 2014-2015 concert season and academic year, the program has trained nearly 50 singers in two-year apprenticeships. 

“We need to access and create more singers and create a program that identifies their skill.” Bass explained. Twice each season, members of the program come to South Florida and join the Seraphic Fire contingent to form an expanded choir in scores that are more effective with larger forces. Half of the trainees have gone on to professional careers and already Seraphic Fire has seen the fruits of the venture. The excellent soprano Elisse Albian, an alumnus, joined the group and has been a frequent soloist over the past seven seasons. There is a similar venture with the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music.

Bass will open his tenure October 15-18 with “Serenade to Music.” The concert takes its title from the iconic and luminous score by Ralph Vaughan Williams (to a setting of a Shakespeare text), one of several “probingly different pieces never done for home audiences – all local premieres, fresh and different,” Bass enthusiastically explains. He finds To the Hands by Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw “a lot like Seraphic Fire, connecting to the past and looking forward to the future.” One section of the score for choir and strings deals with immigration, quoting from Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus. Another is a reframing of Buxtehude while a different section evidences a sense of nostalgia. Choral icon Eric Whitacre’s What David Heard completes the program.

November brings “Blue Notes.” While Bass says “we are not going to become a jazz choir, [but] we are going to explore amazing vocal charts.” The annual December holiday concerts this year are devoted to “Noel: An Old-World Christmas.” Spanish, Iberian, German and Austrian carols share space with traditional Christmas favorites. 

Quigley returns in January for a concert celebrating the college glee club tradition. Other season programs celebrate Scandinavian composers and “American Poets” commemorating the nation’s 250^th anniversary.  The season concludes with “a tribute to the Latin roots of Miami” featuring Ariel Ramirez’s Misa Criolla.

Bass has ambitious plans for future seasons. He wants to present the Requiem by British composer Herbert Howells, Mozart’s Requiem, Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Vespers, Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem (in the orchestral rather than organ edition), Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil and a concert of choral transcriptions of songs by Mahler and Strauss as well as vocal versions of Elgar’s “Nimrod” and Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Seraphic co-founder Joanne Schulte sees “a very bright future under Bass that will go above and beyond past achievements to greater heights.” Bass’s consistently skilled musicianship and superb direction of some of the choir’s most ambitious programs points to an innovative and exciting future for Seraphic Fire.

James Bass conducts Seraphic Fire in “Serenade to Music” 7 p.m. October 15 at Moorings Presbyterian Church in Naples; 7:30 p.m. October 16 at First United Methodist Church of Coral Gables; 7:30 p.m.  October 17 at All Saints Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale; and 4 p.m. October 18 at Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton. seraphicfire.org

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