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Judith Owen

Performer / Vocalist

Judith Owen, a performer whose stylistic range spans rock, pop, classical, jazz, blues, and musical theatre, Owen is also a comedic actress and master storyteller. Born into an overtly musical Welsh family, Judith Owen grew up in London surrounded by classical music, ballet, theatre, and the fine arts. Owen was also exposed to many jazz icons and Broadway musicals that her parents loved (the mixture would become her signature sound).

Owen quickly began performing at a variety of different venues around London. Her unique hybrid of classical/jazz-influenced styled sound soon affirmed a regular slot at Ronnie Scotts.

Judith Owen

Judith Owen

Judith’s new live album “Comes Alive” follows on the heels of her hugely successful 2022 album “Come On & Get It” (over 2.6 million album streams and more than a million YouTube views). “Judith Owen Comes Alive” – released worldwide in early spring 2024 – features 16 tracks recorded live over a weeklong residency in Bern, Switzerland at the legendary Marians Jazzroom in January of this year.

The release of “Judith Owen Comes Alive” is accompanied by tour dates across the US and Europe with headline shows in New Orleans, New York City, Nashville, Oakland and Los Angeles before heading to Paris and Milan in June, and returning to London in July. A string of festival dates in Europe and the US round up the summer.

Judith’s vocals can be found in many Joe Frank programs, including:
Just Get me Out of Here,
The Sacred
Enterprising Man
Mountain Rain
Blues Singer

She appeared alongside Joe in his Largo performance of “The Blue Room”

Learn more about Judith at her web site

Reviews of Joe’s Work

"The perfect Joe Frank experience is driving down an unfamiliar highway alone at night. You turn on your radio and are greeted by a lush, resonant voice that lulls you into a seemingly simple tale of love: a man at an airport saying goodbye to his wife over the phone, which abruptly turns into a vision of betrayal, alienation and death - often from obscure disease - all brought about by some profound personal failing, which is redeemed at the last moment by a nearly transcendent moment of joy."

Salon

"Joe Frank is an invaluable warrior who stands in defense of our fears, our vanities and our forever-eroding sense of ourselves. He transforms the everyday banality of the human comedy into an inspired weirdness that feeds on pathos and irony, and feels a lot like revelation. Sartre would have called it nausea; Frank makes it art."

Spin Magazine

"Joe Frank is a singular voice in radio. What he has done is hypnotic, psychotic, neurotic, sad, terrifying, and some of the funniest stuff I have ever heard anywhere. I can't think of another radio performer who has come close to achieving this kind of alchemy."

Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker

"Joe Frank is an original whose work has helped form some of the most eccentric, dark and interesting parts of public radio's personality. "

Terry Gross, Fresh Air

"[Joe Frank] is one of the great, original radio performers. He's created a sound and style for himself - a complete aesthetic that's entirely his own. I first heard him when I was 19 and it changed everything for me. His work demonstrated the intensity and emotion that the medium is capable of; ingenious…fantastic."

Ira Glass, This American Life

"Radio's Prince of Darkness Rules the Freeways. [Frank is] alternately dark, bizarre and very funny - but always hard to turn off."

The Wall Street Journal

"In an arena in which formats are sacrosanct, Joe Frank has charted new territory with his literate, frequently bizarre, wildly funny essays and parodies... He can be funny, poignant, serious and off the wall - sometimes within the framework of the same piece. Unique is one word to describe it. Brilliant is another."

Los Angeles Times

"A strange, different, wondrously offbeat, frequently hilarious, altogether brilliant piece of work..There's never been anything quite like it...Joe Frank is an audio Fellini."

The Los Angeles Times

"Joe Frank's often bizarre scenarios for the mind are decidedly offbeat radio fare...part surreal satire, part bizarre meditation, part fever dream."

Los Angeles Daily News

"The world of Joe Frank is a wildly entertaining surrealistic universe...hilarious, unsettling, zany, powerful, moving and perhaps the most unique, inventive and effective use of radio since Orson Welles convinced much of America there was a War of the Worlds."

The L.A. Weekly