Bio
Photo by Leah VandenBosch
Flutist and composer Julie Johnson has performed classical, jazz, folk, blues, and world music in concert halls, Italian cathedrals, Texas juke joints, horse barns, and jazz clubs. She works to bring both the flute and her audiences to music they might not have been in contact with before. Julie features her distinct sound and approach–rougher and more soulful than a typical classical sound, yet more pure than a typical jazz player’s–on her 2008 album “Arrest,” a CD exhibiting her eclectic range of style. “Arrest” consists of compositions based on folk and street music from various places.
Julie began playing the flute at the age of ten in Graceton, MN, a small town on the Canadian border. She studied classical music at Augsburg College, and after graduation served as co-principal flute of the Rome Festival Orchestra, having received a Career Opportunity Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board to spend a month in Italy performing there. Playing Native American flutes, she recorded music for the 2000 PBS documentary “Return to the Circle” as well as her own full-length CD, “Haystacke.”
Although she has performed with orchestras such as the Duluth/Superior Orchestra and the Metropolitan Orchestra of Minneapolis, and continues to enjoy performing as a freelancer with orchestras throughout the Twin Cities, Julie is primarily a soloist, and writes much of the music she performs. In 2003, after a brief stint in graduate school for music, she decided instead to play and study with blues musicians (including Allen Daniels and Dede Priest) in Austin, TX, for a while living on the tips she made as a guest soloist in several different bands. In 2004, in order to keep improving her performance techniques, she traveled to Antibes, France to study with Sibel Kumru-Pensel, a former student of Jean Pierre Rampal. She was a featured soloist in two chamber recitals and was accepted into the Conservatoire de Musique et d’Art d’Antibes. In the spring of 2005 she returned to France to play at the Fete de la Flute in Menton and to study with French flutists Aurel Nicolet, Maxence Larrieu, Guy Cottin, and Jean Pinet.
Currently, Julie performs in the Twin Cities as a soloist and ensemble member with many orchestras, chamber groups, blues bands, and world music & jazz groups, including the stylistically versatile cellist Jacqueline Ultan and percussionist Bonnie Hering, in The JuBoJa Trio, and the roots/folk/blues band she created in 2009, Julie Johnson & The No-Accounts, with Doug Otto and Drew Druckrey (of The North Country Bandits and Doug Otto & The Getaways). She has been a featured performer at the American Composers Forum’s salon concerts in St. Paul, the Schubert Club Courtroom Concert Series, and the Thursday Musical Artist Series. In May of 2007, she performed as a featured artist with the Minnesota Chorale. She was a semi-finalist for the 2007-2008 & the 2010-2011 McKnight Fellowship for Performing Musicians, a 2008 fiscal year recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and she has a won a Fall 2008 Music Creative Residency, with a full-tuition scholarship, at the Banff Centre in Alberta. She teaches at MacPhail Center for Music and the Mount Olivet School of Music. Recent performances include shows at the Fine Line Music Cafe, The Black Dog, The Ritz Theater, Art-A-Whirl, The Red Stag, MacPhail Center for Music, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Guthrie Theater.
In 2010, out of 11,000 applications, Julie Johnson & The No-Accounts were chosen for the standby list at the prestigious Austin, Texas music festival South by Southwest. Julie featured Otto and Druckrey on “Arrest,” which received coverage from Rift Magazine, 3-Minute Egg, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the “Take Note” column at Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, which called “Arrest” “a fascinating experiment in using the flute to play such nonflute-like music as blues, jazz, flamenco, and folk.” Said Tammy Reese at Rift, “Johnson mixes contemporary and classical styles into a fine frenzy of idiosyncratic masterpieces … a talent that is sure to become a greater artist than she already has become.”
Recently intrigued by the question of what might be the Upper Midwest’s equivalent to the American South’s rich roots music tradition, Julie’s new project is writing and recording an album based on Minnesota folk music: Iron Range mining songs, French Canadian voyageur songs, Scandinavian hymns, logging songs, and polkas, as well as her own original folk songs based on the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure of the songs she finds. She wants to create arrangements and orchestrations of these Minnesota songs that bring them to life in adventurous new ways, ways that use her own diverse musical background and ask listeners to see this music as pertinent and alive. Julie has received a 2009 Subito Grant from the American Composers Forum to start work on the album.
