Joe Stilgoe brings his own big-band edition of the long-running Friday Night is Music Night to Alexandra Palace Theatre with the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Friday Night is Music Night has been broadcast live since 1953, and its latest edition goes to the jazz singer-pianist Joe Stilgoe at Alexandra Palace Theatre on Friday 25 September 2026.
He was born in Sevenoaks in 1979 to the lyricist Richard Stilgoe and the opera singer Annabel Hunt, read music at Southampton, and has built a career in the space between a jazz piano trio and a variety bill. He sings, plays and writes, and works regularly with the big-band leader Guy Barker and the orchestras that programme evenings like this one. The style is swing written by somebody who grew up around lyricists.
A Jazz Club Symphony is his own edition of the broadcast, built for orchestra rather than trio. He has written three songs into Barker’s suite Inferno 67, which premiered at Ronnie Scott’s, and works regularly with the Hallé, the Royal Philharmonic and the John Wilson Orchestra.
He plays Alexandra Palace Theatre with his new trio, the violinist and conductor Fiona Monbet, and the BBC Concert Orchestra, an orchestra he last shared a stage with in 2022. The material comes mainly from his latest record, Welcome to the Club: The Man in the Moon, Nobody, Mr Peanuts. The theatre is the small room at Alexandra Palace, reopened in 2018 after eighty years dark, a considerably smaller stage than the Great Hall next door.