After starting as a tuba player, says Jacomo Bairos, "It took a long time for me to build up the courage to say I want to be a conductor."
If you’re lucky enough to be at Orchestra Hall on Nov. 13-14 to see Grammy-nominated, Emmy-winning singer-songwriter Andrew Bird perform his original songs and Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, you should know that the guy on the conductor’s podium is the music director of the tour: he helped build the show, edited the arrangements, and has led its rehearsals, sectionals and onstage sound from the start. His name is Jacomo Bairos, an internationally renowned maestro and producer, who once played tuba in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.
After studying at the Juilliard School of Music with eminent former New York Philharmonic principal tubist Warren Deck, now a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Bairos — who co-founded and is artistic director of the Nu Deco Ensemble in Miami — eventually made his way to Chicago and the Civic. In May and June of 1999, during the CSO’s three-week Shostakovich Festival, Bairos even sat in with the orchestra’s expanded brass section for symphonic stagings of selections from Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Bairos also substituted with the Chicago Symphony numerous times, and in fact, played with the CSO during Lang Lang’s debut at Ravinia.
In addition to his extensive orchestral training, Bairos’ formative Civic tenure (1998-99) was spent under the tutelage of the CSO’s longtime Principal Tuba Gene Pokorny, who claims his influence on Bairos was “rather minimal.” Bairos has a far different take. “Gene taught me how to blend,” he says. “Gene was like, ’No, you need to be with the cellos, you need to be with the basses.’ Warren used to say that, too. But Warren was all about the sound, and the core in the middle of the note, whereas Gene was like, “Sometimes you need to be a cello, sometimes you need to be a viola, and sometimes you need to be a woodwind player, a bass clarinet, a contrabassoon. He opened my ears up in a different way.”
And this: “Gene kind of saved my playing. I was really in my head about how to play the tuba and things I needed to do, and Gene’s like, ‘Just blow into the horn and make music.’ He made it so simple again, about the fun of playing the tuba and the fun of making a sound and the fun of all this great music we got to play.” Pokorny, Bairos says, made him "love music and playing the tuba all over again.”
Although Pokorny jokes that he’s a bit “depressed” because there’s no tuba part for him to play under Bairos’ baton, he says he’ll be at Orchestra Hall for a rehearsal or a performance to see his erstwhile student in action and catch up.
“I never imagined him being a conductor,” says Pokorny of Bairos, who was music director of Texas’ Amarillo Symphony from 2013 to 2021. “Probably because he was such an outstanding tuba player. I figured, well, this guy’s going to land a job somewhere with a major symphony orchestra. But I never thought he had an interest in wagging the wand.”
In fact, Bairos had a keen interest, which ramped up during his years at Juilliard. But he kept his conducting ambitions at bay. “I think I was nervous for a long time to express that I wanted to conduct,” he says. “I was like, who am I to say I want to be a conductor? I’m sitting around all these perceived geniuses of my craft. And really, all they did was start when they were 3. I started when I was 11. [Born in Portugal, he moved at age 5 with his family to Florida.] But I didn’t have the gumption to say it, and it took a long time for me to finally build up the courage out loud to say that I want to be a conductor.
"I knew a couple trombone players who switched to conducting. And obviously violinists and pianists. But I didn’t play the piano. I don’t have perfect pitch. I’m not a genius theorist. I just played the tuba, and that was my identity. When I played in the Singapore Symphony [from 2004-07], I had this crazy dream that I was conducting the orchestra, and I woke up the next morning and told my roommate Sam [Hyken], now my partner in Nu Deco, that I wanted to conduct the Singapore Symphony and put on a big concert.”
In 2006, while still the orchestra’s principal tuba, he did just that, and he returned to conduct the Singapore Symphony again in 2019. Before then, however, years of study lay ahead. But as Bairos soon discovered, his orchestral foundation gave him a leg up.
"I think it really helped me in the beginning when I first was moving into conducting, because I had a reputation as a tubist. There was a level of respect that was given to me when I switched over that I received in a lot of places where I conducted. And because I was an orchestral player, there was a general musicianship level within me that matched the environment I was in and that people could pick up on.”
Once Bairos began leading from the front, certain skills he’d honed in the back were no longer beneficial. "I was taught by Warren Deck that you have to drive the bus from the back,” Bairos says. “You have to play so on top of the beat and really drive the orchestra. Not always with conducting. It’s more of a tango. I think it takes a bit of experience to know that less is more, and that took a long time for me to understand that the more you shape and show, and the more they listen and hear, the more together they are, the more they feel like they’re making music. You’re just kind of guiding things along.”
Just as Bairos was reluctant to pursue conducting, Bird had no interest in any further symphonic performing. “I don’t want to speak for Andrew,” Bairos says, “but there were some moments he had with orchestras that, let’s just say, didn’t go as well as he would have liked.”
When the two men met up in Amsterdam in 2019, Bairos mentioned the possibility of collaborating. But Bird couldn’t be persuaded. Bairos, though, didn’t give up. He and Hyken pursued Bird for years as Nu Deco gained momentum. Bird finally agreed to perform with Nu Deco in Miami, drawing on songs from across his catalog, and the experience changed his mind about collaborating with orchestras. When Bird arrived in Miami to work with his ensemble, Bairos said, “We made it our mission to make sure that every second he was onstage, we were doing the absolute best work we could to elevate his music, elevate him, and make him feel comfortable and good.” That cinched it, and an artistic partnership was born.
As the 20th anniversary of Bird’s celebrated 2005 album “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” approached, a celebratory tour began to take shape. Besides performing together live, they recorded two tracks for a five-song digital EP called “Borrow or Rob.” (Over the years, Bairos has done likewise with other non-classical artists, including Jon Batiste, Ben Folds and Faye Webster.)
Bird began working with other orchestras because of this positive experience, and Bird’s and Bairos’ first orchestral gig together was with the Atlanta Symphony in September 2025. So far, by Bairos’ count, they have made between 15 and 20 appearances together. Symphony Center is the second-to-last stop on the last stretch of their current run. Coincidentally, it marks their respective debuts with the CSO.
For Bairos, of course, it’s also a return to his roots.
“One of my mentors in the Atlanta Symphony said some of the hardest concerts in the world are where every three or four minutes you have a new piece, and pop shows can be some of the hardest. But not this one. Everything ties into the next, and the arrangements really support the journey. And the Ravel in the middle breaks it up in a beautiful way. So it’s a joy.”
