My Sunday: Jenny Oaks Baker
Concert violinist Jenny Oaks Baker is no stranger to new stages. Performing as many as 20 concerts a month over a period of four decades, this Grammy-nominated, Billboard topping artist realized this year that she is in a new stage of her life. As she said to Meridian Magazine in October, “I have been throwing myself into performing with my children and building my albums and concerts around them. I’ve been with my kids on stage the last few years of my life. Now I find myself saying, ‘Wait Heavenly Father, they are leaving. You gave me this wonderful, incredible time with them, which has been great, but now what am I going to do with my life?’” Many LDS mothers can relate.
This coincided with her goals to provide audiences musical events that focused on Jesus Christ, her epiphany being that instead of waiting to be invited to perform and then attempt to influence the programming toward the Savior, she could develop concerts herself if she started a production company and took on the new and daunting roles of producer and manager. Her company’s first venture is a 10-city tour, Joy to the World! A Sacred Christmas Celebration, with Jenny Oaks Baker & Family Four (her instrumentalist children) and special guests Alex Sharpe and Jason F. Wright.
Christmas morning. Two days before Christmas my family and I will have just finished our 10-city national Christmas tour that I have also produced. Additionally, on Christmas Eve we will have performed at the MTC for the missionaries. I would hope that Christmas morning we will be able to hopefully sleep in a bit, have breakfast together and then open a few gifts before we head to our ward sacrament meeting where I will conduct our ward choir and also perform with our family in our ward Christmas program. Then hopefully after church we can all take a nap.
Family traditions at Christmastime. We love to cook yummy food and eat it together as a family. We always make almond roca together and give it to loved ones. (My mom started this tradition.) We also love traveling together! Christmas is a great time to travel and experience new Christmas traditions of other cultures! We have performed at Christmastime in Greece, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania, Italy, Portugal, France, and this Christmas season we will be traveling and performing all around the U.S. I am grateful that we are able to perform music as a family that brings us and our audiences closer to the Savior—especially at Christmastime.
More than music. Of course we love music and love performing together, but music is also a lot of work for us. When we have downtime, we want to spend it doing something outside of music...like baking, or watching movies, or exercising.
Christmas Day. This year Christmas lands on Sunday. I think it will be a really special experience, after all our Christmas performances in big concert halls across the US, to perform our last Christmas program in our home ward—for friends and neighbors, without payment and without applause—but with an abundance of the Spirit. That will be the perfect end to our Christmas tour.