Olivia Murphy has quickly established herself as an innovative, creative and colourful artist working in large ensemble composition and has developed her own distinct and personal voice. Her music fuses contemporary composition and song-writing with elements of free improvisation, while always keeping story-telling at its core, hailed as “some of the most exciting large ensemble jazz emerging from the London scene today” (UK Jazz News).

Since being awarded the prestigious Peter Whittingham Jazz Development Award in 2021, Murphy has established and performed with her Jazz Orchestra across the UK, from Birmingham Symphony Hall, to Vortex Jazz Club (London) to Cheltenham Jazz Festival. The Orchestra recorded their debut studio album with support from the Help Musicians’ Next Level Award in 2024. The album (expected release in early 2026) features Murphy’s 4-piece Sister Suite and her Eddie Harvey Award-winning arrangement of You Are There.

In March 2025, Murphy premiered Open World Suite, a fifty-minute, eight-movement jazz orchestra saga inspired by world-building in video games, performed by her jazz orchestra at a sold-out Pizza Express Jazz Club (London). Murphy swiftly followed this in May 2025 with Siren Cycle, a sixty-minute, ten-movement suite, inspired by folklore and Greek myth. The work followed an original long form poem also penned by Murphy, which featured four vocalists, strings, woodwinds, brass and rhythm section. Siren Cycle was commissioned by Tony Dudley-Evans for the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and was celebrated as “an undoubted triumph” (The Jazz Mann) and “A wildly ambitious odyssey… no more impressive event over the whole weekend” (UK Jazz News). Murphy hopes to record both of these ambitious large ensemble works with her Orchestra over the next year.

In 2024, Olivia became a Resident Musical Director for the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, following a successful period as composer-in-residence in 2020-22. As resident MD, she leads weekly rehearsals, mentors young musicians and conducts national performances with the flagship Emerging Professional Band.

Olivia is regularly commissioned and in 2022 was honoured to be invited by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire to re-arrange the Mike Gibbs' piece The Time Has Come to celebrate the legendary and influential composer's 85th birthday. She has also been commissioned by the ABRSM (2024), Sonorite Saxophone Quartet (2023), University of Birmingham (2021), and Around The Houses Festival (2021).

Olivia loves to be collaborative and diverse in her compositional work, from her 2024 piece Europa, written for GOKUMI large ensemble and improvising vocal chorus, to her commissioned solo vibraphone work (for percussionist Gloria Yehilevsky), to lyrical song-writing for her award-winning Moonrise Trio (clarinet, voice and piano).