[1] Francis moved to Perth, Western Australia from Victoria in 2000 to study jazz composition and arranging.
He graduated from WA Academy of Performing Arts in 2004 and completed a PhD at Edith Cowan University in 2015.
[1][2] In 2003, he was nominated for the Australian Jazz Bell Awards' Best Australian Jazz Song of the Year for Land Speed Record off his album of the same name[3] The album was recorded with a nonet in New York and included American saxophonist Jon Gordon.
[4] It was released on Listen/Hear Collective, a record label run by Francis and Johannes Luebbers in Perth.
[11] For his 2021 album Isolation Emancipation, Francis recorded himself playing the trombone for the first time, after he began learning the instrument in 2015.