Jazz pianist, composer, and vocalist Julia Hülsmann creates an intelligent and incisive brand of poetic, airy, artful, yet accessible jazz that balances the Nordic tradition with folk, pop, and contemporary classical tenets. Her primary trio with bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Rainer Winch (who was eventually replaced by Heinrich Köbberling) issued Trio in 2003 and Scattering Poems, with vocalist Rebekka Bakken, the same year. Hülsmann moved to ECM in 2008 and issued the trio outing The End of a Summer; she also co-led the quintet Fasil with guitarist Marc Sinan. Since 2013, she has toured and recorded with a quartet that also includes Berlin-based saxophonist Uli Kempendorff. This group recorded Full View and 2014's provocative, globally acclaimed A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill and America. She returned to the trio format for Sooner and Later in 2016. Her quartet issued Not Far from Here in 2019 and The Next Door in 2022 while touring the European continent.

Born in Bonn, Germany in 1968, Hülsmann took classical piano lessons from the age of 11 and started her first band at 16. In 1991, she moved to Berlin to study jazz piano and piano pedagogy at the University of the Arts (HdK). Her teachers include Walter Norris, Aki Takase, and David Friedman. In particular, she was inspired and influenced by U.S. pianist and composer Don Grolnick. In 1992, Hülsmann joined the Federal Youth Jazz Orchestra, then directed by Peter Herbolzheimer. After graduating in 1996, she founded the Julia Hülsmann Trio with bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Rainer Winch. The trio played music at various festivals and smaller tours. In early 2000, Hülsmann went to New York, where she studied and took lessons with Richie Beirach, Maria Schneider, Gil Goldstein, and Jane Ira Bloom.

At a Wolfgang Muthspiel concert, she got to know the Norwegian singer Rebekka Bakken. Hülsmann began composing for her and released her debut, Trio, at the end of year. After composing, finding suitable lyrics for a vocal project began. She eventually discovered the poet e.e. cummings. The pianist persuaded Bakken to be part of her project, and in 2003 the album Scattering Poems appeared from ACT. It spent several weeks in the Top Ten on the German jazz charts.

Although she is an accomplished songwriter, Hülsmann's work has often tended toward interpretation, and she has done intriguing reconfigurations of the songs of Randy Newman, Nick Drake, and Sting, and has provided striking jazz soundscapes for the poems of e.e. cummings and Emily Dickinson. Come Closer, with vocalist Anna Lauvergnac, was released in 2004 by ACT, followed by Good Morning Midnight, featuring singer Roger Cicero, in 2006. Hülsmann reverted to a straight trio for her first two ECM recordings, The End of a Summer, which appeared in 2008, and Imprint, which followed in 2011. In 2013, Hülsmann released her first quartet album, In Full View, featuring British trumpeter Tom Arthurs.

She did the international festival circuit while conceiving a new project based on the songs of Kurt Weill. Her trio -- with Marc Muellbauer on bass and Heinrich Köbberling on drums -- was again appended by Arthurs and the voice of Theo Bleckman. She radically reconfigured nine Weill tunes and three settings of poems by Walt Whitman, and created what amounted to a concerto for the two additional members. The resulting album, Clear Midnight/Kurt Weill America, was released by ECM in 2015, earning rave reviews and an international tour.

Hülsmann, Muellbauer, and Köbberling toured the world playing on stages across Europe and North America, as well as Peru, Central Asia, and China. The experience of that tour was made clear to listeners on 2017's trio outing Sooner and Later. The influence of the journey can be heard on "Biz Joluktuk," a tune the band heard performed by a 12-year-old violinist in Kyrgyzstan; it was later re-harmonized by Hülsmann. The long-lived trio once again expanded to a quartet, adding Berlin-based saxophonist Uli Kempendorff for Not Far from Here. Issued in November of 2019, it included five Hülsmann compositions and a cover of "This Is Not America," co-composed by David Bowie, Pat Metheny, and Lyle Mays. It appeared in both a quartet version and a solo piano variation.

Hülsmann composed half of 2022's 12-track The Next Door. The balance included compositions from her bandmates, and a tender, spacious rendition of Prince's "Sometimes It Snows in April." ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi