Jessel
Murray

Jessel Murray is a conductor, pianist and educator whose work has helped define the sound of choral and orchestral music in Trinidad & Tobago for more than three decades.

Based in Mt. Lambert, Trinidad, he is a Senior Lecturer in Music in the Department of Creative and Festival Arts at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, where he teaches voice, piano and conducting. He has led the department as its Head across two terms — from 2011 to 2018 and again from 2022 to 2025 — and has served as Deputy Dean for Distance and Outreach in the Faculty of Humanities and Education.

Murray is the founding Music Director and Conductor of the UWI Arts Chorale, which he established in 2000 and has led for twenty-five years, and a founding Music Director — with Nervin Saunders — of the award-winning UWI Arts Steel. He was the founding Music Director and Conductor of the National Steel Symphony Orchestra of Trinidad & Tobago and of the National Sinfonia Orchestra, and has directed the UWI Arts Wind Ensemble. Few conductors have done more to build the institutions through which young Trinidadian musicians now train and perform.

His most distinctive contribution has been to bring the European choral-orchestral canon and the steel orchestra onto the same stage. Working closely with arranger Jeannine Remy, he has led "voices and steel" performances of Orff's Carmina Burana, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, the Fauré Requiem, Rutter's Gloria, the Bach and Pergolesi settings of the Magnificat, Schubert's Mass in G and Part I of Handel's Messiah — major works reimagined for chorus and pan. With traditional forces he has conducted the Mozart Requiem and Coronation Mass, Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai, Ramírez's Misa Criolla and Chilcott's A Little Jazz Mass.

With the National Sinfonia Orchestra he conducted symphonic repertoire from Beethoven's Fifth and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini to Gershwin and Grieg. With the National Steel Symphony Orchestra he premiered original works by Trinidadian composers and arrangers — among them Len "Boogsie" Sharpe, Jit Samaroo, Lord Kitchener and Ray Holman — alongside steel adaptations of the international canon, and led world premieres including Jeannine Remy's Dancing on Steel and Ben Wahlund's steelpan concerto When Eternity Nears with soloist Liam Teague.

As founding chair, co-producer and music director of Must Come See Productions, Murray has staged and conducted more than a dozen full-length musicals at Queen's Hall and beyond — West Side Story, Aida, Hairspray, Beauty and the Beast, The Sound of Music, Oliver! and Fiddler on the Roof among them — work that earned multiple Cacique Awards from the National Drama Association of Trinidad & Tobago.

His ensembles have carried the nation's music abroad — to the United States, Barbados, Costa Rica, Suriname, Guyana, Martinique, Belize and Mexico, and, in 2013, to Yichang and Beijing at the invitation of the Government of China. He has guest-conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica Municipal de Cartago in Costa Rica and combined national choirs and steel orchestras at home, including at the bicentennial of the Holy Trinity Cathedral and in a command performance for the President of Guyana.

Murray holds a Master of Music in Choral Conducting (1989) and a Bachelor of Music in Music Education, summa cum laude (1987), both from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he studied conducting with Alan Harler and collaborative piano with Lambert Orkis. He undertook further study at the Oregon Bach Festival under Helmut Rilling and at the Conductor's Institute at the Hartt School. His honours include the UWI Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence and, from his years teaching in Massachusetts, the Robert Frost Teaching Chair and recognition as a Distinguished Arts Educator. He is a member of the American Choral Directors Association.