STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Jeffrey Zeigler can’t wait to perform the cello concerto that his friend Andy Akiho wrote for him at the Sun Valley Music Festival tonight. But on Thursday afternoon the renowned cellist was excited about touring the Ketchum home once owned by Ernest and Mary Hemingway.

“My wife Paola Prestin just finished an opera, “The Old Man and the Sea,” that was performed at Arizona State University. It took a few years to get permission from the Hemingway family, and I performed in it alongside percussion and a choir. There was spoken text, in addition to singing and four giant pools of water to tell the story of the novel and the story of Hemingway. The recording’s coming out in a month.”

In the meantime, Zeigler will perform the solo part of Akiho’s “Nisei” in its world premiere with the Sun Valley Music Festival at 6:30 tonight—Friday, Aug. 2—at the Sun Valley Pavilion. The free concert brings the former Kronos Quartet cellist full circle from his beginnings as a young cellist growing up in the Bay area.

“My parents enrolled me in a workshop to explore playing the recorder, violin and other instruments when I was 7. And the violin teacher suggested that I play the cello. ‘I didn’t come from a musical family—I hadn’t been exposed to classical music--so I said, ‘Sure, what is it?”

Zeigler’s high school cello teacher was Margaret Tate, a cellist for the San Francisco Symphony who now plays in the Sun Valley Music Festival. And Alasdair Neale, the conductor for the Sun Valley Music Festival, conducted the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra when Zeigler was in it.

“So, Alasdair has known me since I was 15!” he said.

Like many a boy growing up in the shadow of the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletes stadiums, Zeigler’ originally aspired to be a baseball player, or a professional soccer player. But he quickly found himself loving music more than anything.

“If I could have a career reading chamber music in my living room, I would do that. But that doesn’t pay the bills,” he said.

Zeigler played for eight years with San Francisco’s internationally renowned Kronos Quartet, called the most famous new music group in the world for its cutting-edge approach to contemporary music.

“A lot of times, people think I’m a ‘new music’ junkie. I’m not so interested in ‘new music’ but rather in bringing together composers’ ideas with my ideas--having a conversation. I’m not going to just go play with a percussion group because I think it’s cool. It’s got to be relevant.

“If a compose has a particular idea in mind, it’s my job to make it speak the way he wants it to speak. Most music I play is new. And I feel a responsibility: How can I set it up to give future musicians the information they need so they can give it their best interpretation?”

Playing with the Kronos Quartet was like attending a “new music” academy, Zeigler said. Instead of going to class and learning about Philip Glass, he was meeting Glass.

“It was like the old days of jazz,” he said. “Now, you can get a degree in jazz, but in the old days you learned by playing with musicians on tour. That’s the education I got with Kronos. Not only did we go on tour with people like Philip Glass but we worked with musicians from Azerbaijan and India so we got to learn the multitude of ways music is created.”

Glass said it was like being thrown into deep end of the pool given the multiple recordings and performances.

“We were constantly on the road six months a year, constantly half asleep,” said Zeigler, who will join the  Kronos Quartet for the first time in 10 years in an upcoming concert in New York City. “I didn’t suffer jet lag for a year and a half after my son was born 15 years ago. If I got four to five hours sleep, I was golden. I just learned to function without sleep.”

Zeigler said he also developed a refugee mentality for food as do many musicians on tour.

“If you see food, you eat it because you don’t know when your next meal will come. With Kronos we always had very healthy food like fruits and vegetables provided us so I lost weight, even though I was scarfing it down.”

Zeigler is considered one of the most innovative, versatile cellists currently performing—even “fiery,” according to the New York Times. He’s enjoyed performing as a soloist, in part because of the control it gives him, even in deciding whether or not he really wants to book a flight out at 3 in the morning.

He’s performed as a soloist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and others and been featured on soundtracks for award-winning films. And he’s commissioned dozens of works, putting his talents as an improviser to work.

His upcoming gigs include a collaboration with a Flexn dancer.

He’s been collaborating with Akiho for 10 years, playing all the pieces Akiho has written for cello and performing together.

“There are so many parallels in our life. We’re both half-Japanese. Andy grew up in South Carolina and my father’s from South Carolina…” he said. “Andy and I have a shared musical language that we’ve honed across our many projects and performances together, and we’ve poured that—along with our shared cultural heritage and life experience—into every note of the work we will perform tonight.”

Akiho is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and five-time Grammy-nominated composer who started out on the drumline for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks before transitioning to the steel pans with orchestras in Trinidad and New York City.

Known for his eclectic music, he has written commissioned premieres for a variety of orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Oregon Symphony and Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. “Nisei” will be performed by the Oregon Symphony and the Bozeman Symphony in October before the Columbus ProMusica performs it in December and the South Carolina Philharmonic in April.

Akiho told a crowd at the Community Library during an Upbeat with Alasdair discussion on Thursday that he started little solos for himself while teaching and going to school for a performance degree.

“I like to write surrounded by a lot of people, a lot of energy…a bar…coffee shops,” he said.

He said he got the title “Nisei,” which refers to the second generation of Japanese immigrants in America, after visiting the Japanese American Museum in Portland.

Zeigler said he loves the title: “While the Bay area has a lot of diversity, Fremont where I grew up was very white so, as half-black and half-Japanese, I felt like I never belonged anywhere. My wife experiences the same thing having come over from Italy to study at Juilliard, which is where we met. My mother was born in Japan so she wanted to hold onto her culture and, while I regret I never learned Japanese, I do know how to eat Japanese—we even had rice at Thanksgiving Dinner.”

Akiho said he pictured Zeigler on every with every single note he wrote, sending pieces to Zeigler as soon as he finished them.

“I love Andy’s work and I want this to be the best concert ever,” said Zeigler. “Alasdair Neale creates great energy among the orchestra musicians—they’re all very happy, which isn’t the case with a lot of orchestras. And Andy is such a great composer and musician. This is a terrific piece. It has three movements and the third movement is absolutely epic.”