Joep van Leeuwen (born 1955) has taught jazz guitar, jazz history, and combo playing at the Maastricht Academy of Music since 1985. He has been the head of the Jazz department for five years.
After studying classical guitar at the Maastricht Academy of Music, he studied jazz guitar at the Swiss Jazz School in Bern. He has given workshops for festivals in Maastricht, Boston (USA), and Montreux (Switzerland).
Joep van Leeuwen plays both the acoustic and the electric guitar in various positions, from solo guitarist to big band member. He has collaborated with musicians in the Netherlands and abroad and performs at many venues and festivals in Europe, including three times at Montreux.
He is extremely active in the region. He has established many small ensembles, played with the big bands Swing Design and Brownie Speaks, and has sat on a number of boards.
For years he wrote about jazz for the Limburgs Dagblad newspaper and Jazz News magazine. He has performed regularly on the radio and has recorded some CDs and collaborated on publications. In the 1990s he was European coordinator of the International Association of Jazz Educators. Until 2007 he was head of the Master’s programme at the academies of music in Tilburg and Maastricht. He is a member of the research centre “Autonomy and the Public Sphere in the Arts” at Zuyd University.
Joep van Leeuwen is an arranger and composer, with a preference for cool jazz.