Jess's profile
Jess Keyes is a Baltimore-based performer and composer exploring interdisciplinary music-making, ecstatic energy, and communion with the audience. She is a recipient of a 2024 Rubys Artist Award for her project Patien(t/ce), which explores the experience of chronic illness and disability through music for voice and synthesizer with wearable handmade controllers. Jess leads a 12-piece punk brass band called Bedlam Brass and co-organizes Mid-Atlantic Wilderness, a series of experimental improvised music.
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 Wetlands, opening summer of 2024. In 2023, Keyes co-wrote and music directed The Gold Night, a full-length musical theater show for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society that explore 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.
Keyes holds Bachelor of Music in Saxophone and Masters of Music in Ethnomusicology degrees from the University of Alberta.
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