Julian Joseph

Julian Raphael Nathaniel Joseph entered the world on 11 May 1966 in London, England. As a pianist and bandleader, he has led efforts to dissolve longstanding divisions separating jazz from classical music. His twenty-piece All Star Big Band draws together leading figures from each sphere, among them Tony Remy, Jean Toussaint and Andy Sheppard. Although his recordings have earned strong critical praise across multiple outlets, Joseph regards them chiefly as supplements to his stage appearances, remarking: “Recording is just a documentation of where you are creatively. Live is where you move on and do other things.” Performances at the Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall and the Barbican in London, together with appearances at Canada’s Montreal Jazz Festival, have drawn audiences from an unusually broad spectrum.

The fruitful fusion of contrasting idioms stemmed from his classical-composition training at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts, where he routinely merged prescribed listening—Prokofiev and Beethoven—with jazz touchstones such as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. His third album captured a Wigmore Hall concert that showcased Alec Dankworth, Eddie Daniels, Jason Rebello and Johnny Griffin. That same year he also gave a live BBC television performance of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto In F and shared a duet with Bheki Mseleku. He subsequently commenced work on a fourth album, this time recorded in the studio with drummer Mark Mondesir and bassist Reginald Veal.