Delivering one of the best UK jazz albums of 2026 there’s a chance this autumn for a Belfast audience to hear Julian Joseph perform at the Ulster Hall on Bedford Street with the Ulster Orchestra on George Gershwin’s 1924 first performed classic, Rhapsody in Blue.
‘Energy of the Trees’ from the Nine Elms Suite – named after the reborn area of Battersea not far from Vauxhall in London which has been massively developed in recent years.
Julian, 60 this year, was born in London and attended primary school in nearby Wandsworth before later studying at Berklee in Boston and debuting to massive acclaim in the 1990s with The Language of Truth, one of the defining UK jazz releases of the last 40 years.
His style lands in the Mulgrew Miller and Chick Corea influenced domain and he himself is an influence on new generation players running a Jazz Academy in East London on such by now established players as Deschanel Gordon and Sultan Stevenson.
He has written operas and other classical work and led his own big band. I have heard him play numerous times & interviewed him in addition – read my review of his big band appearance at Ronnie Scott’s that ran in Jazzwise in 2011. In Ireland I attended a Cork Festival broadcast he did in 2010 the year Herbie Hancock and Robert Glasper both appeared at the festival when JJ had a regular jazz show on BBC Radio 3 and introduced to the stage the great Irish singer Christine Tobin. On Julian Joseph’s new album there is a local Irish connection in that Irish singer Ken Papenfus (frontman of the rock band Relish, from Downpatrick, County Down) is featured on the Stevie Wonder-esque track ‘Ponto de Meditação’. Julian has also frequently appeared as a panellist on BBC TV Proms coverage.
The Belfast based Ulster Orchestra will be conducted by Ryan McAdams who is principal conductor of Crash Ensemble who are reckoned to be Ireland’s foremost contemporary music group. I heard Crash Ensemble at the Happy Days festival in 2014 performing Samuel Beckett’s radio collaboration Words and Music quite brilliantly featuring music composed by Morton Feldman at the Ardhowen Theatre and starring Adrian Dunbar as Words and Ian McElhinney as Croak. Julian has performed the Gershwin jazz influenced classic with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Other items on the programme are Schulhoff’s Symphony No. 2 first performed in Prague in 1935, Leonard Bernstein‘s Fancy Free from the 1940s and movements from Julian’s own Nine Elms Suite first performed in March this year. Before the concert Julian will participate in a talk joined by the Ulster Orchestra’s artistic director Patrick McCarthy.
- A link to the concert page for further details of the 9 October concert
