Joshua Moshe

Biography

Joshua Moshe is an award-winning saxophonist, composer, and educator based in Melbourne, Australia. He was born in South Africa and spent 10 years immersed in the New Zealand music scene where he finished high school before ‘crossing the ditch’ to study music in Melbourne.

Joshua has made a name for himself as one of the leading forces in Melbourne's flourishing new wave of jazz with his unique genre-bending sound. His music is firmly rooted in jazz but he clearly draws inspiration and influences from outside the genre, owing much to the rhythms and production sensibilities of contemporary styles like hip-hop and electronica, alongside traditional folk music influences from his background. Far from merely reinterpreting such styles with a jazz instrumentation, Joshua’s approach goes much deeper, incorporating and flipping all of these elements on their head whilst fully embracing the rawness and expressive qualities of improvised jazz music resulting in something that is at once both new and old, innovative yet rooted in tradition, historic but contemporary.

Recognition

He has earned numerous accolades, including the award for best jazz album at the 2023 Music Victoria Awards and the 2019 PBS Young Elder of Jazz Award. He was also nominated in a seperate category as ‘Best Musician’ at the 2023 Music Victoria Awards. Additionally, his JK GROUP release "The Young Ones" was nominated for Best Jazz Album at the 2020 Music Victoria Awards while Inner Search was nominated for the Australian Music Prize just one month after it was released.