Mace Francis

Mace Francis (born 1978) is an Australian composer, band director, and academic.^[1]

Francis moved to Perth, Western Australia from Victoria in 2000 to study jazz composition and arranging. He graduated from WA Academy of Performing Arts in 2004 and completed a PhD at Edith Cowan University in 2015.^[1][2]

In 2003, he was nominated for the Australian Jazz Bell Awards' Best Australian Jazz Song of the Year for Land Speed Record off his album of the same name^[3] The album was recorded with a nonet in New York and included American saxophonist Jon Gordon.^[4] It was released on Listen/Hear Collective, a record label run by Francis and Johannes Luebbers in Perth.^[5]

In 2005, Francis formed the Mace Francis Orchestra and they released seven albums over the next 15 years.^[6] Their album Music for Average Photography was nominated for two awards, making the 2016 Australian Jazz Bell Awards shortlist for Best Australian Jazz Ensemble,^[7] and winning 2015's Art Music Awards for Jazz Work of the Year.^[8]

Since 2008, Francis has been Artistic Director of the West Australian Youth Jazz Orchestra, and Musical Director for their Wednesday Night Orchestra.^[9][10] He has also held the position of Festival Director at the Perth International Jazz Festival since 2017 after the festivals founder and previous Festival Director Graham Wood died.^[11]

For his 2021 album Isolation Emancipation, Francis recorded himself playing the trombone for the first time, after he began learning the instrument in 2015. The album was released with a new band Mace Francis Plus 11.^[12]

From traffic rises: Site specificity and the compositional process (2016)

Music in Site: Integrating elements of site-specificity into composition (2015)

Site in Sound: A Review of Four Musical Works that Integrate Site Into Sound (2012) with Cat Hope

Bob Brookmeyer: composer, performer, pedagogue (2006)