Joost Lijbaart is a versatile drummer who uses a lot of different influences in his playing. Born in Amsterdam, he started drumming when he was seven years old. After several years of classical percussion lessons he went to the conservatory in Hilversum where he followed lessons from Cees Kranenburg, Marcel Serierse and Gerhard Jeltes. He graduated in 1991. During his study he went to Senegal (West-Africa) to take lessons in African percussion with the legendary DuDu and Ali un D’Aya Rose.
Besides jazz, pop and improvised music he worked with modern classical music and dance. In 1990 he performed with students from the National Ballet Academy, played modern classical percussion music from Xenakis, Cage, Reich and worked in different projects with Theo Loevendie and Louis Andriessen.
He formed with Yuri Honing the Yuri Honing Trio in 1989. With this group he did concerts and tours in more than 60 countries all over the world. During a tour in the Middle East in 1998 the trio was introduced to the music of the Arab world. The result was a bigger group called Orient Express with a Libanese singer and two musicians from Iraq. This group did several tours in the Middle East and the Netherlands. In 1993 he won the 15th Europe Jazz Contest with the Nicolas Thys trio. For this performance he received the “best drummer award”. In 1995 he joined the Michiel Borstlap sextet with Yuri Honing, Eric Vloeimans and Benjamin Herman. With this group they released the double CD the sextet live in 1996 and did several tours in the Netherlands. A tour in China in 1998 was filmed by Dutch documentary maker Jop Pannekoek.
From 1995 he works also with Agog a trio with guitar player Frank Wingold and bassguitar player Mark Haanstra. 
With this group Lijbaart won in 2002 the Dutch jazz competition and was awarded as best soloist from the contest by American drummer Elvin Jones. From 2002 Joost started his own quartet “group of friends” with Yuri Honing, Benjamin Herman and Mats Eilertsen. For this group he is also very active as a composer. He played on the North sea jazz festival with this band in 2003. A DVD of this concert was released in 2005.
Another new group is the duo with piano player Wolfert Brederode. A CD of this group will come out in Autumn 2006. With the duo they did a project with dancer and choreographer Lonneke van Leth. Also they played music on the spoken book Shadowchild from Dutch writer Frans Thomese.
This year Joost’s main groups are the Yuri Honing Acoustic Quartet and Wired Paradise, an exciting electro/rock group with Yuri Honing.