Winning a Grammy can be brutal.
Skipping class to receive his award and party like a rock (or, in his case, Latin jazz) star, Mark Walker is no longer running on the high. "I'm running on nothing," he said last week after returning from the whirlwind trip.
Walker was one of three Berklee College of Music teachers to receive an award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences last Sunday at the ceremony in Los Angeles.
Walker, associate professor of percussion, and Oscar Stagnaro, professor of bass, received the iconic golden gramophone statue as part of the Paquito D'Rivera Quintet for Best Latin Jazz Album, "Funk Tango.
Associate professor Eugene Friesen won his third Grammy for Best New Age Album as a cellist on the Paul Winter Consort's "Crestone.
Stagnaro, a low-profile Peruvian bassist, never told his students of the success. "Maybe next time I'll let them know," he said.
In fact, he missed the ceremony to play a gig in Maine, where he received the good news from Walker in the form of a simple text message: "We got a Grammy."
Though Walker has won four Grammys and been nominated for twice as many, this year brought his first nomination as an individual artist. That came in the category of Best Instrumental Composition for his song "Deep Six, which he recorded with Oregon, a jazz group. "It was quite a shock," Walker said. "I don't really think of myself as a composer, I think of myself as a player."
In the end, Walker didn't win for that, but, he said, "it only made me want to work harder."
