Jenny Oaks Baker

Violinist Jenny Oaks Baker has appeared as a soloist with ensembles including the National Symphony Orchestra and the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, while her recordings of soundtrack, rock, holiday, and religious material have registered on Billboard genre charts. Her first album, On Wings of Song, came out in 1998 during her time as a master’s candidate at Juilliard, and her ninth release, 2011’s Wish Upon a Star: A Tribute to the Music of Walt Disney, earned a Grammy nomination. In 2019, Jenny Oaks Baker & Family Four presented Baker alongside her four children, who perform on violin, cello, guitar, and piano.

Born in Provo, Utah, Jenny June Oaks took up the violin at age four. She made her initial appearance as an orchestral soloist at eight and collected multiple competition prizes while still young. She completed undergraduate violin studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, then received her master’s degree from the Juilliard School in New York City in 1999. That same year she married Matthew Baker and issued her debut album, On Wings of Song, featuring hymns arranged for violin with orchestral accompaniment.

She continued issuing graceful violin interpretations of familiar pieces, releasing Songs My Mother Taught Me on the Desert Book label in 1999. After moving to Shadow Mountain Records, her 2000 album Where Love Is included Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals and a Beethoven romance alongside folk and pop selections. Around the same period she joined the National Symphony Orchestra as first violinist, a post she held for seven years.

Her fourth album, 2001’s American Tapestry, focused on American compositions ranging from the Civil War era through Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. In 2003, Mormon Tabernacle released The Light Divine, a program of classical and religious pieces centered on hymns. Desert Book then issued her first compilation, The Best of Jenny Oaks Baker, which reached the Top 20 of the Billboard Classical Albums chart.

After leaving the National Symphony Orchestra to devote more time to her expanding family, Baker delivered her first Christmas album, O Holy Night, in 2007. It appeared on Billboard’s Holiday Albums chart, after which she issued 2008’s Silver Screen Serenade, followed by the 2010 religious collection Then Sings My Soul and 2011’s Wish Upon a Star: A Tribute to the Music of Walt Disney, all on Shadow Mountain Records. Wish Upon a Star received a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Album.

A second holiday recording, Noel: Carols of Christmas Past, appeared in 2012, and 2014 brought Classic: The Rock Album, which revisited hits from the 1960s through the 1990s and became her seventh project to reach the Billboard classical chart. The next two years yielded the religious albums My Home Can Be a Holy Place and Awakening. Her 2016 collaboration with the Millennial Choirs & Orchestras, Amazing Grace: Songs of Atonement, peaked at number eight on the Billboard Christian albums chart. Another set of hymns and spirituals, The Spirit of God, followed in 2018. In 2019 she returned with Jenny Oaks Baker & Family Four, an assortment of pop, classical, religious, and film music performed by Baker and her four children, all instrumentalists aged between 12 and 18 at the time of release.