Julius Gabriel

Baritone Saxophone
(Germany)

Julius Gabriel is a saxophonist whose work focuses on the exploration of his instruments in all their limits and dimensions. As a solo artist, he searches for the confluence of corporeality and transcendence. He expands his improvisations through an ancient chapel, creates otherworldly drones through electronic manipulation, or transforms the saxophone into a percussion instrument. His creative and genre-bending approach is manifested in several solo albums.

As a collaborator he founded the trance-inducing duo Paisiel with sound sculptor and percussionist João Pais Filipe, the dark roaming jazz group Ikizukuri with Gustavo Costa and Gonçalo Almeida, most recently reinforced by Susana Santos Silva on trumpet, the agitational avant-garde group Das Behälter fronted by writer and performer Xenia Ende, the psychedelic jazz noise quartet Blutiger Jupiter, and the reeds duo About Angels and Animals with Jan Klare. He is a member of the Barry Guy Blue Shroud Band, which brings together 14 musicians with diverse expertise and backgrounds in baroque music, jazz, folk music, contemporary classical music and free improvisation, and has played with the London Jazz Composers Orchestra under Guy's direction.

Born and raised in East Berlin, he began his musical education at public music schools, broadened by the underground club culture and free jazz pioneer Gunter Hampel as a mentor. At the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, he completed a BA in Jazz Performing Artist, supplemented by courses at the Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media and ensemble projects for New Music. He received a scholarship abroad to Porto, Portugal and was artist in residence at the Indian Music Experience Museum in Bangalore, India.