All That Jazz

31 Jan, 2026

Just back from a glorious evening at the Logan Center on campus, where my wife and I saw the Julia Keefe Indigenous Jazz Ensemble. As the name suggests, everyone in the group is descended from an Indigenous people of North America. A few thoughts:

1. This was something short of a big band—only three saxophones, one trumpet, one trombone, and a rhythm section (with no guitar)—but still a bigger band than most contemporary jazz acts. That means a lot of polyphony.
2. Julia Keefe is a singer as well as a bandleader. Some of her vocals were purely instrumental, which was beautiful, but when she sings, she does so with a clarity that reminds me of Diana Krall. I would have liked to hear more.
3. I went into the evening expecting jazz interpretations of traditional Indigenous music—something like what Emil Viklický and company did with Moravian folk music on Prší Déšť, which I heard performed in a Prague club in the 1990s. What we got instead was music by Indigenous composers, past and present: the inheritors of a jazz tradition that paradoxically began with religious education in the notorious Indian boarding schools.
4. But there are still echoes of Indigenous culture in the music—thematically, as in “Blood Quantum,” and artistically, as in the peyote chant that opens Pepper’s Pow Wow.
5. Duke Ellington supposedly said, “I’m not the world’s greatest musician; I’m the world’s greatest listener.” That spirit lives on in Delbert Anderson’s “Iron Horse Gallup,” which makes you want to run for the train.
6. An American university campus is a wondrous thing. In the space of three days, I taught, went to two talks, had a doctor’s appointment, saw two Boris Barnet films (part of a retrospective organized by my wife and her excellent former student Hannah Yang), and attended a first-rate jazz concert—all within four blocks of home. It is a little socialist utopia, akin to the fantastical version of Akademgorodok in Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty—this one well endowed by American capitalism.
7. I have a few friends and relatives retiring at what seems from my perspective to be an indecently early age. My guess is that they don’t like their jobs and want to spend more time at book club. Thankfully, I love my job, which essentially involves going to book club all day long. And when the day is done, movie club and jazz club are just down the road.