Not one to rest on his laurels, Kim Scholes has successfully pursued a variety of musical activities. His career has encompassed chamber music, pop-rock touring and recording, composing and arranging, solo classical performing, commercial recordings for television and film, teaching, and orchestral playing. An Oklahoman by birth, Mr. Scholes first noticed the cello watching the Lawrence Welk Show with his family. Piano and cello lessons started at age five, and after rapidly advancing on both instruments, Kim was enchanted by chamber music. After turmoiled teenage years, he was drawn to New York City by the eloquent and elegant playing of cellist Bernard Greenhouse of the original Beaux Arts Trio. Before actually graduating from the Manhattan School of Music, Kim unexpectedly won an audition to tour and record as a member of folk-rock artist Harry Chapin’s five member band playing the cello and keyboards. He performed in 200-250 cities a year worldwide, and recorded four albums on Elektra Records. After 600 performances it was time to move on, and Mr. Scholes worked as an arranger and orchestrator for commercial recordings in New York and composed the score to the very low budget horror film “The Nesting”.

Returning to classical performance, and during post-graduate studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, Kim won the Concert Artists Guild Competition and the US Trust Artist Award, which provided debut recitals in New York, Washington D.C. and Boston. Appearances as a recitalist and concerto soloist throughout North American ensued. As a chamber artist, he performed regularly with Boston’s Musica Viva, the Carnegie Trio, and as a founding member of New England Camerata. He also won an award for Excellence in Teaching in the Gregor Piatigorsky Artist Award Competition in Boston. This prize led to a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an instructor of cello and chamber music. Further appointments followed at the Hartt School of Music (University of Hartford), the Longy School of Music in Cambridge MA, and at Chicago’s Roosevelt University where he became a tenured professor. He has recorded on the Titanic, Summit, and Cedille record labels, among others. Mr. Scholes also had the good fortune to commence his orchestral career with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as an “extra”, is now Principal Cellist of Opera Pacific and the Pasadena Pops Orchestra, a member of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Los Angeles Opera, and is a former Principal Cellist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

Of utmost importance to Kim is his daughter Jessica, a research scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. He plays a fine Domenico Montagnana cello made in 1723, is a student of wine and an avid, but mediocre, tennis player.