After 25 years performing across Europe, sharing stages with Ray Charles and Tony Bennett, and building an international career as a vocalist and visual artist, Joe Bourne found his way to Oro Valley. He has no plans to leave.
Joe Bourne grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, singing in church choir and on street corners, the kind of origin story that sounds invented until you hear the man perform. He discovered his influences early: Nat King Cole, Lou Rawls, and the smooth architecture of the Great American Songbook. He could not have known that following those influences would take him from a Top 40 R&B band in the States to a record label in the Netherlands, a Christmas special filmed in a German monastery with Ray Charles, and eventually to a patio home in Oro Valley with a studio full of beeswax and acrylic paint.
He has been here for 26 years. He still loves it.
The Long Way Here
The road to Oro Valley ran through Atlanta, then Rotterdam, then most of the known world. After meeting his wife, who was originally from the Netherlands, Bourne moved to Europe in 1975 for what was supposed to be a couple of years. It turned into 25.
He settled in the town of Leiden, built his career methodically, and performed across Scandinavia, Germany, East Berlin, Australia, Aruba, Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and beyond. He performed on German and Scandinavian cruise ships, sang at a Christmas TV special with Ray Charles filmed inside an ice-cold monastery, and toured his Nat King Cole tribute through Texas A&M, Pennsylvania venues, and concert halls across the country.
The move to Arizona was due to his wife’s arthritis. She had been visiting her daughter in Tucson and kept coming back transformed, looser, lighter. The desert agreed with her. When the Bournes’ family on the East Coast started dropping hints that maybe 25 years overseas was long enough, the Bournes made the trip to see the area in April 1999, found a new development in what would become Vistoso Villages, put down a deposit, went back to the Netherlands, sold the house, said their goodbyes, and showed up the following year.
“I knew absolutely no one,” he says. That changed fast.
Networking by Instinct
Bourne came to Arizona as a working entertainer who needed to build a market from zero. He joined the Black Chamber, visited the Hispanic Chamber, and found his way to the Oro Valley Chamber of Commerce, which at the time had about 100 members at its networking luncheons.
At his first OV Chamber meeting, he stood up when it was his turn to introduce himself, said who he was, and then someone in the room, a well-known figure from a local brewing company, asked if he could sing something. He did a piece of a jazz standard, and after that, everybody in the room remembered him. He has been a Chamber member for nearly 25 years.
He also joined the Tucson Visitors Bureau, which opened a different set of doors. He sponsored one of its luncheons, set up a large screen TV, and showed a 10-minute highlight reel of his European performances. That same afternoon, he got a call from Tubac Golf Resort asking if his New Year’s Eve was available.
The Sound
Bourne performs jazz, blues, R&B, and the Great American Songbook, with a smooth, warm vocal quality that has prompted comparisons to Nat King Cole for decades. Carol Cole, Cole’s daughter and head of King Cole Productions, said of Bourne’s tribute album and concert that he has such a smooth vocal quality so reminiscent of her father’s, and that the arrangements were among the best she had heard from any tribute artist.
Local audiences can catch him regularly at The Views on the third Monday of every month from 4 to 6:30 p.m., where he has been performing for the past seven years. He also performs monthly at Dominick’s Italian Restaurant on N. Thornydale Rd. and has been a regular performer at the Invisible Theater since 2005.
Upcoming performances include Chillin’ at the Chul at Tohono Chul on Friday, July 10, from 6 to 9 p.m.; a Holiday Concert at the Invisible Theater on December 13; and a performance at Gaslight Music Hall on December 16, 2026.
He has a 10-piece Motown show. He takes his Nat King Cole tribute on tour, booking through an East Coast agent. He has performed at corporate events, music festivals, symphonic and pops concerts, and private events. He will be performing at the Legal Aid conference in September. He has been doing this for a very long time, and his voice, by all accounts, has not appreciably changed.
Paint, Wax, and a Chance Art Class
The visual art started on a cruise ship. In the mid-1990s, Bourne was performing on the MS Europa, a five-star German cruise ship that traveled the world. On a voyage from Manaus, Brazil, up through the Amazon and across the Atlantic to South Africa, one of the guest speakers on board was an art teacher who invited passengers to join her watercolor class. Bourne had never painted. He joined the class.
A Raven in the Sun – Joe Bourne
At the captain’s dinner at the end of the cruise, students exhibited their work. He got so many compliments that he decided to keep going when he got home. He bought watercolor supplies in the Netherlands. When he moved to Arizona, he switched to acrylics. Then, through a workshop at Toscana Studios in Oro Valley, he discovered encaustic painting.
Encaustic is a centuries-old technique that uses heated beeswax mixed with resin as the medium. The word itself means “to burn.” Bourne has made it his own, embedding stones, copper, steel, paper, and fabric into the wax to create layered, textural mixed-media pieces. “Whatever will adhere to the wax,” he says.
He currently has several pieces on display at Absolutely Art in Catalina. He also creates art merchandise: ceramic tiles, coasters, cutting boards, mugs, scarves, and more, and produces custom awards and recognition pieces for organizations and corporations. His work has been featured at the Tucson Museum of Art gift shop and at the Hilton El Conquistador. The Oro Valley Chamber of Commerce uses its custom-designed awards for its top-tier members, with new awards coming this July.
His first painting sale came at a Doctors Without Borders silent auction in the Netherlands, where he donated two pieces he had made. One sold for 2,000 euros. He did not know who bought it.
East Berlin and the Christmas Album
Some of the best stories from a long career take a while to surface. One of them involves the Berlin Wall, East German currency, and a Christmas album.
After winning the Silver Orpheus award at a Bulgarian song festival and a prize at the Cavan Song Festival in Ireland, Bourne began receiving invitations to perform in Eastern Bloc countries. From the mid-1980s until just three months before the Berlin Wall came down, he performed regularly in East Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, and Rostock, backed by a 70-piece orchestra and Russian-trained ballet dancers.
He was paid in East German marks, which were essentially worthless outside the country. So, he spent them there, hiring local musicians, booking a studio, and recording a Christmas album he had always wanted to make but could never get his Dutch record company to fund. He left East Berlin with a master tape, which he could legally take with him since the money was already spent.
Back in the Netherlands, he pressed the album as a cassette, showed a sample to a corporate client, and walked away with an order for 1,000 copies. The distributor called shortly after and ordered 11,000. That launched his corporate gift business, eventually landing his music products in the holiday catalogs of various Dutch grocery chains, similar to our Safeway and Fry’s, and filling a regular spot at the Hoover Dam gift shop for years.
