FANFARE Magazine: 'Meet Julius Williams,' Feature Article by Lynn René Bayley

[Julius P. Williams; Somewhere Far Away; Dvorak Symphony Orchestra Winston Salem State University Choir; Julius P. Williams, conductor; Troy 1072 (2008)]

We present a brief excerpt from a detailed FANFARE Magazine article which includes an interview with Julius P. Williams and a review of some of his recorded music:

FANFARE

Feature Article

Meet Julius Williams

Written by Lynn René Bayley

Tuesday, 27 March 2012

“Julius P. Williams (b.1954), a composer-conductor from New York, is one of the more interesting performers on the scene. Growing up, he worked as a youth at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church before moving to Queens where he learned music by playing his uncle’s piano. He attended the Andrew Jackson High School of Music and Art, went to a summer program at the Manhattan School of Music, and then four years to Lehman College’s Hartt School of Music in the Bronx. His mentors, none of whom he has forgotten, included John Motley, Coleridge Taylor Perkinson, Ulysses Kay, and Fred Norman, all of whom encouraged him in his career. He then studied conducting at the Aspen School of Music with Perkinson and Fred Roland.

Williams opened the 1999 Tri-C Jazz Festival in Cleveland with a powerful performance of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Service . He wrote an article on Duke Ellington for Emerge magazine in 1999 and was co-author/editor of a vocal anthology on Hall Johnson (Carl Fischer, 2003). He is also a passionate educator, serving on the faculties of Wesleyan University, the universities of Hartford and Vermont, and Purchase College of the State University of New York, and is currently professor of composition and conducting at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In short—he gets around!  [Julius Penson
Williams, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and Ulysses Kay are profiled at AfriClassical.com]