Baker Artist Portfolios

Jess Keyes is a Baltimore-based performer and composer exploring interdisciplinary music-making, ecstatic energy, and communion with the audience. She performs improvised and composed music on saxophone, keyboards, and synthesizers, alone and with others, and she is an active member of the shape note singing community and a novice clawhammer banjo player. She has a robust solo artistic practice that brings original electro-acoustic aleatoric compositions together with fiber arts and lighting design to produce powerful, intimate performance art experiences.

Keyes is a recipient of a 2024 Rubys Artist Award for Patien(t/ce), which explores her experience of chronic illness and disability through music for voice and synthesizer with wearable handmade controllers. She has performed and lectured internationally, presenting the custom-designed Patien(t/ce) system and original music a wide range of audiences. She is currently adapting the system into an interactive instrument that uses biofeedback to create music, which will be included in a gallery exhibition in spring of 2026.

Recent notable collaborations include Will the Great Water Remember, composed with Patrick McMinn for the National Aquarium. First a large-scale composition and performance for the Voyages series in 2022, Keyes and McMinn expanded the work into a permanent installation in the Harbor Wetland, which opened in August of 2024. In 2025 they released the entirety of Will the Great Water Remember as a digital 6-album set, available on all streaming services. They are putting out a vinyl release of “Past” and “Future” in 2026, funded by a Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant.

In 2023, Keyes co-wrote and music directed The Gold Night, a full-length musical theater show for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society that explores themes of environmental conservation and economic pressures in the guise of an attack by a giant ice worm on the far north town of Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush.

She leads a 12-piece punk brass band called Bedlam Brass and is an avid collaborator with artists of all types throughout the Baltimore area.

Keyes holds Bachelor of Music in Saxophone and Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology degrees from the University of Alberta.