David Kay

Since 1988 David Kay has taught in the music department of the all-boys University School Upper (high) School in Hunting Valley, Ohio, as well as teaching from 1988 to 2018 at the Interlochen Arts Camp, the oldest and most prestigious summer arts camp in the world.

Mr. Kay has performed in concert with nearly 50 internationally known popular and jazz artists such as Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Chris Botti, Peter Erskine, Clark Terry and Benny Golson, and has been reviewed on recordings in Down Beat magazine. He has been soloist and participant in (including as chorus vocalist) a wide range of groups and settings in classical and many non-classical styles (such as jazz, rock, Latin), as well as dozens of pit orchestras. For over twenty years, Kay has been a member of the sax section of the Jazz Heritage Orchestra, a large jazz ensemble under the artistic direction of Dennis Reynolds, former lead trumpeter in the Count Basie Orchestra. He earned undergraduate degrees in music education and telecommunications from Michigan State University, and his Masters degree in Jazz Studies from Indiana University where he was also an instructor in their Jazz Studies Department, having taught undergraduate and graduate classes. Kay has given over two dozen presentations at conferences and universities throughout the United States and Canada and has been an MENC Jazz Mentor as well as an OMEA Solo contest adjudicator. His saxophone teachers while at Indiana included long time IU saxophone professor, the renowned Eugene Rousseau, and Daniel Deffayet of the Paris Conservatory; for improvisation he studied with legendary IU Jazz Studies chair David Baker.