Composer Karl Jenkins stands out for an output of striking breadth, one that has taken in jazz, rock, film scores, advertising music, New Age pieces, and choral classical writing. He is known above all for the song Adiemus, for the sequence of classical and New Age recordings that grew from it, and for the frequently staged mass The Armed Man.
Born in Penclawdd, Swansea, Wales, on February 17, 1944, Jenkins received his earliest instruction from his father, a schoolteacher, organist, and choir director in the area. He studied music at Cardiff University, continued at the Royal Academy of Music, and later received a doctorate in music from the University of Wales. By the late 1960s he had been drawn into London’s active jazz community, where he played saxophones, keyboards, and oboe. He worked with bassist Graham Collier’s ensemble and formed the jazz-fusion group Nucleus, which appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1970. In 1972 he joined the progressive-rock band Soft Machine and wrote much of the material for its well-received albums of the 1970s and early 1980s.
During the 1980s and 1990s Jenkins built a thriving practice composing for advertising, earning two industry awards in the process. Portions of that music later migrated into his concert works, most notably the song Adiemus, performed by Miriam Stockley and first heard in a 1994 Delta Airlines commercial. The track succeeded independently, and the project expanded through five widely popular Adiemus albums—Songs of Sanctuary, Cantata Mundi, Dances of Time, The Eternal Knot, and Vocalise—that blend Celtic, global, and electronic elements within a foundational concept often labeled New Age or classical. Equally prominent is The Armed Man (1999), a mass setting that draws on the medieval melody L’homme armé together with additional texts and musical sources. Hundreds of choirs, professional and amateur alike, have presented the work across Britain and elsewhere. Scored for a 70-piece orchestra, it signaled Jenkins’s subsequent turn toward still larger classical canvases. The Peacemakers (2014) assembles texts by Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Anne Frank; its 2012 premiere recording featured the 1,000-voice ensemble The Really Big Chorus. Cantata Memoria: For the Children (2016) honors the children lost in the Aberfan Disaster, the Welsh mine-waste collapse that claimed 116 young lives.
Jenkins has remained productive well into his seventies, releasing recordings chiefly under his own name. The album Miserere: Songs of Mercy and Redemption appeared on the Decca label in 2019, the same year that saw Karl Jenkins: Piano, a collection of his piano music performed by the composer himself. He returned in 2023 with One World, a commission from World Choir for Peace director Nicol Matt.
