The Fisher Center at Bard and Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies Present Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, November 1
Bridging diverse legacies, the vital present, and an exhilarating future of Indigenous peoples in jazz, Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band kicks off Native American Heritage Month
“Jazz is a uniquely American art form. The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band… takes that one step further.” —Olympian
“[Julia] gives me hope for the future of jazz.” —Judy Carmichael, NPR Jazz Inspired
The Fisher Center at Bard, one of the country’s leading multidisciplinary producing houses, partners with Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies to present a concert from Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band (JKIBB), November 1 in the Sosnoff Theater. The performance from the ensemble of Native and Indigenous jazz musicians, led by the celebrated vocalist and luminary Julia Keefe (Nez Perce), celebrates the start of Native American Heritage Month.
With a mission to lift up Indigenous musical innovation and develop a network of programming in arts, education, and advocacy, JKIBB embodies the Fisher Center’s mission of incubating innovative arts programming and the Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies’s mission of showcasing contemporary Indigenous excellence and creativity.
JKIBB, founded in 2022, features 16 band members, and, as the Band’s artistic statement reads, upholds the tradition of songs as “the vessels of stories and lessons for the Indigenous people of the Americas.” Performing pieces from their under-appreciated predecessors in jazz, alongside works by contemporary Indigenous composers, the band spotlights a vibrant, long-standing tradition of Indigenous improvised music today. Their statement continues, “Indigenous cultures are not monolithic; many cultures carry traditions and songs as old and sacred as the next. The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band reflects a wide range of Indigenous identities, from South America to Canada, Northeast to Southwest. Together, we represent a long-silenced, long-forgotten chapter of jazz history: the participation, contribution, innovation, and legacy of Indigenous jazz musicians. A legacy that seasoned composers and arrangers Julia Keefe and co-founder Delbert Anderson (Diné) carry forward through original works inspired by songs and rhythms of their Native heritage, reimagined through the language and stylings of jazz.”
The concert begins at 7 pm, and The Center for Indigenous Studies invites guests to join in a community gathering starting at 5:30 pm at the Sosnoff Theater. Before the performance, complimentary food offerings from Chef Taelor Barton (Cherokee Nation) will celebrate seasonal Indigenous foodways. Barton’s cooking is a tribute to Cherokee culinary wisdom, serving up history on a plate. A maker’s market will feature work by local artists and information about Bard’s affiliated programs.
About Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band
The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band (JKIBB) is an ensemble of Native and Indigenous jazz musicians from across Indian Country. Performing pieces from their under-appreciated predecessors in jazz, like Mildred Bailey (Coeur d’Alene) and Jim Pepper (Kaw/Mvskoke), alongside works by contemporary Indigenous composers, the band spotlights a vibrant, long-standing tradition of Indigenous improvised music today.Led by the celebrated vocalist and luminary Julia Keefe (Nez Perce), the ensemble brings charisma, passion, and purpose to every stage, leaving audiences both inspired and educated. Premiering at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts in 2022, the band quickly gained a reputation for deepening and challenging our understanding of the “uniquely American” art form known as jazz. JKIBB features a ‘who’s who’ of Indigenous bandleaders today and has headlined marquee events, including the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2024.
About Julia Keefe
Julia Keefe (Nez Perce) is an internationally acclaimed Native American jazz vocalist, actor, activist, and educator currently based in New York City. Her professional career has spanned over 18 years, and she has headlined marquee events at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., NMAI-NY, as well as opened for the likes of 20-time GRAMMY Award winner Tony Bennett and 4-time GRAMMY Award winner Esperanza Spalding. Her life’s work is the revival and honoring of the legendary Coeur d’Alene jazz musician Mildred Bailey, and she is leading the campaign for Bailey’s induction into the Jazz Hall of Fame at Lincoln Center.Keefe grew up in Kamiah, ID, on her Tribe’s reservation before moving to Spokane, WA. It was in Spokane that she began studying music and competing at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival each year. In 2007, she won Outstanding Vocal Soloist in the alto division at the festival. She earned her bachelor’s in music from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in 2012, graduating with honors. She taught jazz voice at Gonzaga University and was a guest clinician at North Idaho College and the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival before deciding to relocate to New York City. She earned her master’s in music from Manhattan School of Music in 2019, under the tutelage of Theo Bleckmann, Kate McGarry, Jo Lawry, Stefon Harris, Dave Liebman, and Phil Markowitz.
Keefe also has a passion for Indigenous film and was a featured artist in Sterlin Harjo’s critically acclaimed documentary, Love and Fury. Her first feature film, Virginia Minnesota, was the closing feature at the Catalina Film Festival in 2018. She is the Executive Director of the Board for One Heart Native Arts and Film Festival, an annual non-profit festival in Spokane, showcasing the diversity and vitality of contemporary Native art in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Keefe’s recent recording, Nobody Else But Me, was released to glowing reviews. In addition to rehearsing for an upcoming album, she is currently directing the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, a new project highlighting the history and future of Indigenous people in jazz, and the Mildred Bailey Project will be released in winter 2023. Julia has performed with world-class musicians, including Jim McNeely, Emmet Cohen, Billy Test, Dan Hearle, Andreas Oberg, Bob Bowman, Clipper Anderson, Jack Mouse, and the Lionel Hampton Big Band, among many others.
Tickets
Tickets start at $25; $5 tickets for Bard students are made possible by the Passloff Pass. For more information regarding tickets, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at (845) 758-7900.Funding Credits
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Carolyn Marks Blackwood and Gregory H. Quinn, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, Andrew E. Zobler, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, The Shubert Foundation, Smokler/Hebert Family Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.The creation of the Center for Indigenous Studies and the expansion of the American and Indigenous Studies program was made possible through a transformational endowment gift to Bard College made by the Gochman Family Foundation in 2022.
About Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies
The Center for Indigenous Studies (CfIS) carries a mission to develop a network of the broadest possible educational and public programming focused on humanities, sciences, and arts in Native American and Indigenous Studies and to increase Indigenous communities’ access to higher education. Extending work and initiatives that began as part of the Mellon Humanities for All Times “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project and ongoing curricular work in the American and Indigenous Studies program, the Center for Indigenous Studies also nurtures new programs under its own auspices and has independently commissioned and presented performances, scholarly talks, supported Indigenous student organizations, and convened annual symposia. Public programming is designed to expand dialogue around, support for, and investment in research crucibles for innovative Indigenous artists, allies, and thinkers. Using multiple modalities, the Center for Indigenous Studies develops and sustains engagement and new curriculum for all generations, commissions and curates dedicated programming in the arts to showcase exemplary Indigenous practice and innovation, and provides continuous research opportunities for students, faculty, and staff throughout the Bard global hub and to the wider community, extending the reach of American and Indigenous Studies to a truly international audience.About the Fisher Center at Bard
The Fisher Center is a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education that demonstrates Bard College’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. To support artists, students, and audiences in the examination of artistic ideas, the Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire.
Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. This world-class theater building will be complemented by a new studio building designed by Maya Lin, scheduled to open in 2026. More than 200 events and 50,000 visitors are hosted at the Fisher Center each year, and over 300 professional artists are employed annually. As a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide, the Fisher Center produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines every year. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.
The Fisher Center was born from the Bard Music Festival, founded in 1990, which, for the first 13 years of its existence, occupied several spaces on campus, including a large tent. Each summer, the Music Festival focuses on the life, work, and influences of one composer, promoting new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. When the Fisher Center and its two theaters opened in 2003, the summer festival expanded to include a fully staged opera, as well as theater and dance performances. The highly acclaimed opera program brings unjustly neglected works to the stage in major productions—often making their US debuts.
Through Fisher Center LAB, the Center’s acclaimed residency and commissioning program, artists are provided with custom-made support toward their innovative projects and their work has been seen in over 100 communities around the world. Resident choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s 2018 Four Quartets was recognized as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally by the Fisher Center in 2015 before transferring to New York City. Illinoise, a 2023 Fisher Center world premiere from artists Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, was recognized with a Tony Award for Best Choreography following its tour and transfer to Broadway.
The Fisher Center is home to several of Bard’s academic programs in the performing arts. Year-round, it hosts performances by the undergraduate Dance Program and Theater and Performance Program; the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music; The Orchestra Now (TŌN), a Bard graduate program that is training the next generation of classical-music ambassadors; and students at the Bard Conservatory, the first (and so far only) conservatory to require all its students to pursue a bachelor of arts degree in a field other than music in addition to their specialized music studies. As a hybrid institution, the Fisher Center brings together professional and academic art-making of the highest caliber, where student and professional artists work side by side, learning from each other and informing one another’s practices.
Fishercenter.bard.eduHome is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. This world-class theater building will be complemented by a new studio building designed by Maya Lin, scheduled to open in 2026. More than 200 events and 50,000 visitors are hosted at the Fisher Center each year, and over 300 professional artists are employed annually. As a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide, the Fisher Center produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines every year. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.
The Fisher Center was born from the Bard Music Festival, founded in 1990, which, for the first 13 years of its existence, occupied several spaces on campus, including a large tent. Each summer, the Music Festival focuses on the life, work, and influences of one composer, promoting new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. When the Fisher Center and its two theaters opened in 2003, the summer festival expanded to include a fully staged opera, as well as theater and dance performances. The highly acclaimed opera program brings unjustly neglected works to the stage in major productions—often making their US debuts.
Through Fisher Center LAB, the Center’s acclaimed residency and commissioning program, artists are provided with custom-made support toward their innovative projects and their work has been seen in over 100 communities around the world. Resident choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s 2018 Four Quartets was recognized as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally by the Fisher Center in 2015 before transferring to New York City. Illinoise, a 2023 Fisher Center world premiere from artists Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, was recognized with a Tony Award for Best Choreography following its tour and transfer to Broadway.
The Fisher Center is home to several of Bard’s academic programs in the performing arts. Year-round, it hosts performances by the undergraduate Dance Program and Theater and Performance Program; the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music; The Orchestra Now (TŌN), a Bard graduate program that is training the next generation of classical-music ambassadors; and students at the Bard Conservatory, the first (and so far only) conservatory to require all its students to pursue a bachelor of arts degree in a field other than music in addition to their specialized music studies. As a hybrid institution, the Fisher Center brings together professional and academic art-making of the highest caliber, where student and professional artists work side by side, learning from each other and informing one another’s practices.
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LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT FOR BARD COLLEGE IN ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON
Developed in Cooperation with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community
In the spirit of truth and equity, it is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we are gathered on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who are the original stewards of the land. Today, due to forced removal, the community resides in Northeast Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We honor and pay respect to their ancestors, past and present, as well as to future generations, and we recognize their continuing presence in their homelands. We understand that our acknowledgment requires those of us who are settlers to recognize our own place in and responsibilities toward addressing inequity and that this ongoing and challenging work requires that we commit to real engagement with the Munsee and Mohican communities to build an inclusive and equitable space for all.This land acknowledgment, adopted in 2020, required establishing and maintaining long-term and evolving relationships with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. The Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Humanities for All Times grant for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” offers three years of support for developing a land acknowledgment–based curriculum, public-facing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) programming, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard.
This event was last updated on 10-08-2025
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