Ulysses Owens Jr. Credit: photo by Rob Davidson

Feted jazz drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. is returning to Orlando this week as a featured performer in Timucua Amplifies Black Voices programming. It’s the Timucua Arts Foundation’s performance series celebrating innovative regional Black artists.

For this return engagement at the Timucua house venue, Owens is joined by jazz guitar legend Barry Greene and award-winning Hammond B3 organist Pat Bianchi to play as the 904 Jazz Organ Trio.

The three-time Grammy-winning percussionist hails from Jacksonville, where Owens’ foundational music training was at church. His mother, a choir director, would prop Owens up by the drums to keep an eye on him at rehearsals and the rest was history. Owens began playing the drums at age two, and landed his first gig playing drums for the church by age 6.

By adolescence, Owens knew that music was all he wanted to do, closely studying the works of jazz legends like Miles Davis. Fast-forward to age 16 and Owens was in New York to visit not just family, but also renowned jazz drummer John Riley.

“I think at that moment — between hearing this Miles Davis record, meeting John at 16 — I was like, ‘I want to move to New York and I want to be a jazz musician.’ And then I put all my energy towards that and then like a year later, I found out about Juilliard,” says Owens, “They had some really cool educational outreach programs that gave us — I should say particularly minorities — access to the school. They had an initiative called the Juilliard Experience where they were encouraging high school students, like juniors and seniors, to come to the school to shadow a student, because they were trying to boost enrollment for what we now identify as BIPOC students.”

Owens knew that he wanted to be part of the Juilliard School. And as luck would have it, during Owens’ senior year in high school, Juilliard began jazz studies programs.

“It was like all these serendipitous events occur within that period and that’s when I realized not only is that what I want to do, but I think that is very much part of my destiny,” says Owens. “So it was all those things coming together.”

Owens graduated from Juilliard in 2006 and began his life as a performing musician in earnest. He has laid down drums on Grammy-winning albums by Kurt Elling and the Christian McBride Big Band. And for over seven years, Owens has also been a faculty member at Juilliard in the jazz department.

Paying it forward, Owens leads Generation Y, a collaborative endeavor that promotes young talent. Generation Y released their debut album A New Beat in January of last year. The nine-track album features a fusion of jazz standards and fresh, inventive perspectives from the young ensemble. It’s part of Owens’s tribute to both jazz tradition and to the young people who will be charged with upholding that tradition.

“I already have Gen Z in my band. I just spoke to a kid last night, Carlos, who’s in Florida. He’s like 20 and I’m like, ‘Hey man, I think I wanna get you in the band’ and he’s excited. I think Gen Y is sort of the staple brand at this point, we won’t change that. But it will be YZX millennial, or whatever other alphabet we can come up with to identify generations. Because the goal for me is just [to] keep getting new and keep it fresh,” Owens says.

When in New York of late, Owen is a blur of activity. He’s juggling work on a second album with his own Big Band, and a new Generation Y record, with an aim to record the latter later this year. Owens is also a drummer in the Broadway production A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical, set to close at the end of February after a nearly four-month run.

While he is frequently in the Big Apple, Owens’ actual homebase is Florida. Owens works as the artistic director of his family’s nonprofit in Jacksonville, Don’t Miss a Beat. That work keeps him close to home, and close to his three-year-old son, who — Owens proudly shares — has already started singing and dancing.

“I’ll be like LeBron. I’ll stay in the game long enough for my son to be in my band,” Owens jokes.

Owens isn’t keen on giving people previews of his upcoming live shows, but he does tell Orlando Weekly that he’s been concocting a tribute to “the greats.”

“Jazz organ is a huge tradition in our idiom. You have folks like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff and Groove Holmes and the list could go on and on, so we’re going to honor them,” Owens says.

Recent news headlines on the subject of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have been weighing on Owens’ mind. Timucua’s celebration of Black voices in music comes at a time when more attention is falling on efforts to promote diverse faces — and attempts to stifle those same efforts.

“I’m the only Black guy in my group, yet the program is supposed to be ‘amplified Black voices.’ However, I think that in my desire to amplify music and artistic freedom, I enlist tons of collaboration to do that,” says Owens. “We’re going to obviously amplify the creators of this idiom who largely are African American, but it’s a completely inclusive collaborative moment. Which is why you’ve got Pat, who is Italian, and Barry, who’s Jewish. Between the three of us you’ve got the Rainbow Coalition up there! Which to me is what it’s all about. So yeah, love it. I’m excited to be part of the series.”

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This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.