Bio:
Julian Lloyd Webber enjoys one of the most creative careers in music today. As a solo cellist he has performed with many of the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors including the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and every leading symphony and chamber orchestra in the UK in partnership with such conductors as Sir Georg Solti, Lorin Maazel, Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Neville Marriner, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sir Mark Elder and Sir Andrew Davis. He has also collaborated with a wide range of legendary musicians from pianists Sir Clifford Curzon and Murray Perahia to jazz artists Stephane Grappelli and Dame Cleo Laine and rock musician Sir Elton John.
Julian’s many recordings include his BRIT Award-winning Elgar Cello Concerto conducted by Yehudi Menuhin – chosen as the ‘finest ever version’ by BBC Music Magazine, the Dvorak Cello Concerto with Vaclav Neumann and the Czech Philharmonic, Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the London Symphony Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich, a coupling of Britten’s Cello Symphony and Walton’s Cello Concerto with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields which was described as ‘beyond any rival’ in Gramophone magazine and ‘Variations’, famous as the theme to ITV’s long running ‘South Bank Show’. Julian has also inspired more than fifty new works for cello from composers as varied as Malcolm Arnold, Joaquín Rodrigo, Andrew Lloyd Webber, James MacMillan, Philip Glass and Eric Whitacre.
In 2007, at the invitation of the Secretary of State for Education, Julian founded the UK Government’s In Harmony programme and he continues to Chair Sistema England. The two programmes combined have introduced the power of music to more than sixty thousand school children from the least privileged parts of England. Julian was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1994 and is the recipient of a Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum (1998) the Classic FM Red Award (2005) and the Incorporated Society of Musician’s Distinguished Musician of the Year Award (2014). Julian has represented the music education sector on BBC1’s Question Time and The Andrew Marr Show, BBC2’s Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s Today, The World at One, PM, Front Row, and The World Tonight.
In 2014 Julian was forced to retire from playing the cello due to a neck injury which reduced the power of his bowing arm. In July 2015 he was appointed principal of Birmingham Conservatoire. During his five-year tenure he oversaw the move to a new £57 million building and the merging of the existing Conservatoire with the Birmingham School of Acting. In September 2017 the Conservatoire was awarded the Royal status by Her Majesty the Queen.
Julian is married to fellow cellist Jiaxin Cheng. A lifelong Leyton Orient supporter, he was the London Underground’s first official busker and the only classical musician to perform at the Closing Ceremony of Olympics 2012.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).