She’s Restoring Native American Jazz History — and Creating Her Own

At first, Julia Keefe simply wanted the world to finally know about the historical legacy of Native Americans in jazz.

But with her flagship project, the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, the vocalist and enrolled member of the Nez Perce tribe built a creative dynamo inspiring original compositions and arrangements. Rather than merely illuminating the past, Keefe and her far-flung cast of young Indigenous collaborators are blazing a new chapter in jazz history.

“With a lot of younger folks in the band, they thought they were the only Indigenous jazz musicians out there,” said Keefe, 36, who makes her Cal Performances debut with the Indigenous Big Band March 6 at Zellerbach Playhouse.

“We’re all scattered to the winds and four directions, and the more we do this work, the more we connect with these folks who’ve felt really isolated. Our roster is growing. We’ve connected with well over 60 people, and my hope is to get us all together for an Indigenous jazz summit,” she says.

Vivacious and earnest on stage, Keefe has spent much of her life searching for traces of Native Americans in jazz. Growing up in Spokane, she fell in love with the music as a child, entranced by the plaintive quality of Billie Holiday’s voice. Gigging in her early teens, she discovered that pioneering big band vocalist Mildred Bailey, cited by Holiday as an influence, grew up on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in Idaho before relocating with her family to Spokane.

“Not only was Bailey Indigenous,” Keefe said, “she was from my part of the country, and like me, spent formative years in Spokane. Holy smokes!”

Often referred to as “The Rockin’ Chair Lady” after one of her early hits, Bailey was the first woman to sing with a jazz big band, touring with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra from 1929-33. Along with Louis Armstrong, she played an essential role in shaping Bing Crosby’s jazz-inspired phrasing, which is to say, American pop music. Though Bailey recorded dozens of classic songs with the era’s greatest improvisers, she’s largely been forgotten since her death in 1951 at the age of 44.

Other prominent Native American jazz artists included “Big Chief” Russell Moore (1912-1983), the prolific Pima trombonist best known for several stints with Louis Armstrong. And the number of Black jazz greats with Native American heritage remains striking, including modern jazz architects such as drummer Max Roach, bassists Oscar Pettiford and Charlie Mingus, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

But those attenuated connections rarely manifested on the bandstand, with the notable exception of Los Angeles bass maestro John Clayton’s “Red Man-Black Man,” a suite commissioned by the 2006 Monterey Jazz Festival that explored resonances between African American and Native American music.

Keefe began developing the Mildred Bailey Project around 2009. It eventually put her on the jazz map, and connected Keefe with other Native American jazz musicians. There had been talk for years about creating an Indigenous jazz orchestra, but financing the unprecedented venture seemed impossible until she landed a major grant from South Arts in 2021.

She turned to Diné trumpeter Delbert Anderson to co-lead the 16-piece ensemble, which made its debut at Olympia’s Washington Center for the Performing Arts in 2022 (quickly followed by a stellar performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival). The repertoire initially focused on expanded arrangements of Keefe’s Bailey material, and pieces like Kaw and Muscogee saxophonist Jim Pepper’s medicine song “Witchi Tai To” (an unlikely FM radio hit in 1969 for the jazz-rock band Everything Is Everything).

But the more time the musicians spent together, particularly during a spring 2024 residency at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival, the more they honed their original Indigenous jazz material.

“What’s evolved is folks being able to bring in their own music, music from their tribes and different parts of the Western hemisphere,” Keefe said. “Now we’re really expanding more into band member’s personal songbooks, melodies from their tribes. It’s such a  beautiful showcase of pan-indigeneity.”

The orchestra includes Indigenous musicians from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, Hawaii and Cuba, many of whom contribute pieces on the ensemble’s upcoming debut album Incarnadine. Keefe tapped one of the band’s trombonists, Arkansas-raised Quinn Carson, to produce the project.

Now ensconced in the Los Angeles studio scene, the Apache and Kiowa horn player had already created his own orchestral project in L.A. to play music from his Indigenous heritage. Combining Apache melodies with big band swing, New Orleans brass, and 1990s R&B grooves, Bone FX found an avid audience online. As the only Indigenous musician in the project, he was thrilled when a friend connected him with Keefe about three years ago.

“I was in this dark room doing this research into Native American songs, what it would sound like before contact,” said Carson, who’s performed often in the Bay Area as a sideman but has yet to bring his band north. “Julia turned this light on, and now there are 15 people in the room with me, and we’re all working together.”

In jazz, movements grow from exactly this kind of cadre. With each performance, Keefe and her collaborators connect with new Native American musicians, sometimes inspiring people to pick up instruments abandoned since high school or college.

“Every other gig, if not more, we have at least one person in the audience who comes up and says they’re Indigenous and used to play, or they are an active jazz musician,” Keefe says. “It happens so much more often than people would guess.”

If jazz, that most omnivorous of art forms, sees a long-overdue Native American moment, the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band will have put the process in motion.

The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band performs on Friday, March 6, at Zellerbach Playhouse (2413 Bancroft Way, Berkeley). Tickets and more information here.