Shortly after dawn Nov. 8, Andrew Koeppe’s phone pinged with a text from bandmate Ryan Reynolds: “We got nominated!”
Across town, Kari Landry was watching the Grammy nominations on YouTube.
“We were on tour in Oregon, and I was staying in a host family’s carriage house with my husband, Matt. We’d pulled a mattress out into the living room so that our baby could sleep in the bedroom, and we were watching the telecast. But I couldn’t find our category, for the life of me,” said Landry, a lecturer in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. “Then my phone started buzzing.”
Landry and Koeppe, a research technician associate for Michigan Medicine, learned last fall that “Strands,” a piece they’d recorded with their reed quintet Akropolis, had been nominated for a Grammy Award. “Strands,” which appears on the ensemble’s 2024 album, “Are We Dreaming the Same Dream?” was a collaboration with composer and jazz pianist Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman.
According to Landry, “Strands” is about the multiple, diverse influences that make up the American identity.
“The piece was composed by Pascal and has melodic material that builds but doesn’t weave together until the very end,” Landry said. “In the middle, we go into this improvised section, then all the strands come together at the end in a unified, rhythmic pattern.”
In a moment both Landry and Koeppe say felt surreal, “Strands” did indeed win the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition on Feb. 2 in Los Angeles. But 16 years before they stood on stage with a statuette at LA’s Peacock Theater, the five members of Akropolis were undergrads majoring in music at U-M.
Growing roots in Ann Arbor
When the ensemble began to play together in 2009, there was only one other known reed quintet: Calefax, a Dutch group that formed in 1985. As a result, aside from what had been written for that ensemble, there weren’t many musical composition options for Akropolis.
To fill that void, the five members of Akropolis — Landry and Koeppe, who play clarinet and bass clarinet, respectively; Reynolds on bassoon; Matt Landry (Kari’s husband) on saxophone; and Tim Glockin on oboe — approached U-M student composers to write original material for them.
Their U-M professors also encouraged Akropolis to try out for chamber music competitions.
“We had a lot of success in those competitions and that galvanized us toward a common goal. It helped us see that Akropolis could make a name for itself,” Landry said.
Akropolis even recorded an album during those early years, “High Speed Reed,” by enlisting the help of student recording engineers.
Things got a bit more complicated when band members began to graduate. Glockin was the first to leave Ann Arbor, after he was accepted into the master’s program at Yale.
“Some groups may have just replaced their oboist, but we didn’t want to do that,” Landry said. “We really liked the chemistry of the five of us, and Tim wanted to keep playing, so we poured the money we earned that year into flying Tim back and forth from New Haven for our performances.”
Glockin’s move also showed group members they could practice individually — then pull things together in rehearsals before a performance. That proved doubly necessary when Reynolds also moved to pursue his doctorate at Florida State. Today, Reynolds is in Madison, Wisconsin, and Glockin is at the University of Northern Colorado. Koeppe and the Landrys are still based in Michigan.
Turning a side gig into a living
As its members pursued new opportunities, Akropolis evolved as well, with the group establishing itself as a nonprofit organization in 2015.
“One of the first things we did was set up an LLC so we could get our money out of Matt’s bank account and into a business account,” Landry said.
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To help with the administrative aspects of the ensemble, Landry went to Eastern Michigan University to get a master’s in arts administration — and she found mentors who proved valuable in helping the ensemble learn how to make a living as a band.
“Susan Booth, who just retired as the program director of arts administration at Eastern Michigan, as well as Mark Clague, who was our musicology professor at U-M and is now the head of Michigan’s Arts Initiative, were both very supportive,” Landry said. “They were among the first on our board of directors, taught us how to structure a nonprofit organization, and helped us think about revenue models beyond performing and touring.”
Today, Landry teaches entrepreneurial courses in the EXCEL program at U-M, sharing what she’s learned with Akropolis.
As a nonprofit, Akropolis participates in more than 100 performances and education programs annually. They run a Detroit-based summer festival, hold music composition residencies at three Detroit-area high schools, and produce a 10-day artist training and mentorship program in Petoskey. They’ve also released six commercial recordings and have commissioned more than 200 works for the reed quintet instrumentation.
Establishing a legacy
Akropolis’ considerable influence is evident in the fact that, when they began playing in 2009, there were a handful of reed quintets. Today there are hundreds worldwide.
Akropolis is also the first reed quintet to win a Grammy.
Both Landry and Koeppe say winning the award has increased the band’s visibility and is opening doors. They’re also still on a high from the whole experience.
While there were countless memorable moments from their weekend in LA, Landry said she was particularly excited to walk behind singer Chappell Roan on the red carpet.
“There were some really good red-carpet shots of her where I’m right in the background,” Landry said, laughing.
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Koeppe loved being able to meet one of his lifelong heroes, Valerie Coleman of the Imani Winds.
“The Imani Winds was the first chamber music concert I’d ever seen. I was in middle school, and my mom convinced me to go see them at the old Borders bookstore on Liberty in Ann Arbor. They were cool, and I thought, ‘I want to do that,’” Koeppe said.
After collecting their award at the Grammys’ Premiere Ceremony earlier in the day, Akropolis attended the primetime show — then headed back to their hotel bar to celebrate.
“As the impact of the award really hit us, it felt good to just be sitting there in a comfortable place, taking it all in with one another,” Koeppe said.
“One of the most challenging things in our history has been sticking to our guns because we are an atypical instrumentation. But our secret sauce is that Akropolis is a family. We’ve stuck together during the toughest of times: rough performances, instrument malfunctions, health issues. And when big, shiny things like a Grammy win happens, it’s affirming.”
