Seattle radio shows boost recognition of Indigenous jazz

In 1969, Jim Pepper, a saxophonist from Kaw and Creek tribal heritage, released a groundbreaking single, “Witchi Tai To,” as part of the New York-based jazz fusion group Everything is Everything. Created by Pepper, the single blends a traditional peyote chant he learned from his grandfather with Pepper’s sophisticated jazz-rock sensibilities.

A landmark hit that reached No. 69 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, “Witchi Tai To” was the first time many Americans explicitly heard the influence of Native American music in jazz. In truth, while jazz was first conceived by Black Americans in 19th century New Orleans, Indigenous musicians and their musical ideas have played a vital role in jazz since its early days.

“Jazz music would not sound the way it does if it wasn't for Native people...I can't emphasize it enough,” said Kevin Sur, co-host of KEXP’s Sounds of Survivance, a radio show centered on Indigenous music.

“Native people never get their flowers when it comes to the absolute profound, ‘holy sh––’ influence that they've had on every genre of music, and especially jazz.”

In recent years, the ways Indigenous musicians, history, and culture are intertwined with jazz has gained more recognition, particularly as contemporary jazz musicians of Indigenous descent, like award-winning vocalist Julia Keefe and her Indigenous Big Band, have gained visibility nationally. In Seattle, two local radio shows, Indigenous Jazz on Daybreak Star Radio and Sounds of Survivance on KEXP, are joining the efforts to illuminate and celebrate the Indigenous jazz genius.

‘The musicians are the context’

In the 1930s, jazz vocalist Mildred Bailey, born and raised on the Coeur d’Alene reservation in Idaho, broke ground as the first woman vocalist to perform regularly in front of a big band.

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AP

Bailey, who inspired peers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, is just the start of a long line of trailblazing Native jazz talent. Saxophonist Charlie Parker (Choctaw), bassist Oscar Pettiford (Choctaw and Cherokee), trombonist “Big Chief” Russell Moore (Pima), trumpeter Miles Davis (Cherokee), trumpeter Don Cherry (Choctaw), and pianist-composer-bandleader Duke Ellington (Cherokee) also have Native heritage.

For a variety of reasons, including the fact that these aforementioned greats were recognized primarily as African American, Native American influence on the artform has been concealed throughout history.

“ You’re talking about people that were seen [by society] as Black, but were part of the intersection of Native and Black peoples,” Sur said.

The persistence of the “vanishing Indian” stereotype, a harmful myth that depicts Native Americans as a disappearing people — whether physically or culturally — and has often been used to justify the seizure of their lands and the suppression of their traditions.

It is another reason Native jazz history has been so obscured, according to John-Carlos Perea, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. Perea, who is of Mescalero Apache, Irish, Chicano, and German descent, is also a Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist.

Perea notes that in the field of ethnomusicology (the interdisciplinary study of music within its cultural context), there was a period in which white ethnomusicologists like Alice Fletcher, Francis Densmore, and John Comfort Fillmore studied Native music within a framework called “salvage ethnography.”

This framework, which emerged in the 19th century as Native communities faced widespread colonization from European countries and the United States, was fundamentally focused on recording the cultural practices and traditions of cultures considered “threatened with extinction” due to colonization.

But, as many critics have noted, this framework’s assumption of disappearance serves forces of colonization and assimilation by justifying exploitation and cultural appropriation. It also erased Native agency, thereby discounting the ongoing contributions to American and European cultures by Native people. These effects still persist in academia and in Western culture.

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“That idea of disappearance, that idea of salvaging our music, I don't think that's been worked out,” Perea said.

Perea also noted that non-Native people’s expectations of Indigenous culture are often informed by narrow, sometimes bigoted, portrayals of Native Americans in scholarship and pop culture. For instance, there’s an assumption that Native music is always loud, high, and scary, he said. But, Native people are not a trope, nor is Native jazz.

“It's always been traditional for us to be contemporary. So in that sense, it's not a choice between old and new or authentic and inauthentic,” Perea said. “When Pepper plays [the jazz standard] ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ that's still Native jazz. That’s what he wanted to play. If he then plays ‘Witchi Tai To’ after that — same gig, same show, same musician — the instrumentation or the context [doesn’t have] to change to make it authentic...the musicians are the context.”

The road to Indigenous jazz radio

With a desire to counteract misconceptions and celebrate the vibrant and diverse jazz talent within Indigenous communities, 22-year-old Markus Dekanogisdi Teuton, set out to start his own radio show at Daybreak Star Radio, a station broadcasted from the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, located on the northwest edge of Seattle’s Discovery Park.

“ I just really want to showcase the power, the resilience, the Indigenous genius, really,” Teuton said. “Growing up, like in school or in my college classes, people were going like, ‘oh yeah, the Native people were slaughtered.’ We all died. It's like, is this all we do? Fight, hunt buffalo, and die? I'm like, no. We are so much more than that.”

Teuton, who’s Cherokee and member of Echota-Tanasi Ceremonial Ground in Park Hill, Oklahoma, has kept a strong connection to his Native heritage throughout his life. As a child and adolescent, Teuton spent his summers on his tribe’s ceremonial grounds, learning traditional music, hearing stories from his father and uncles, and participating in ceremony.

Keoni Moore

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Markus Dekanogisdi Teuton

At the same time, Teuton listened to blues and soul music, and during his time at Seattle’s Eckstein Middle School and Roosevelt High School he found he gravitated toward peers who played in the school jazz band. In his junior year at Roosevelt, he tried out for the band himself and got in. After graduating in 2020, Teuton went on to study jazz at University of Washington, while also performing frequently at jam sessions and festivals throughout the city.

“My band Joint Souls, we play a lot. We played Folklife,” he said.

Teuton began interning at Daybreak Star’s radio station, which broadcasts musical, educational, cultural, and language arts programming internationally through their website and app, in 2022. A few months later, he was asked to put together his own radio show and found it natural to dive deeper into his passion for jazz.

Teuton has pulled together nearly 600 titles for the show that highlight Indigenous jazz legends, as well as up-and-coming and local Indigenous jazz artists. The Seattle-based jazz-funk collective, Khu.éex’, made up of Indigenous musicians from the Tlingit, Haida and Blackfoot tribes, is one of his favorite contemporary groups.

“ Jim Pepper's great. I play him all the time. But, learning about Delbert Anderson, Khu.éex’, Julia Keefe, John-Carlos Perea, like all that great music out there,” Teuton said.

“With Daybreak Star Radio it was really about representation, getting more visibility, showcasing Indigenous creativity, showcasing Indigenous resilience, [and] Indigenous power.”

Joining a greater push

Along with several other Indigenous music programs at Daybreak Star Radio, Teuton’s jazz show shares the airwaves with KEXP’s Sounds of Survivance, a global Indigenous music radio program that first aired in 2023.

Named for a concept of resistance coined by Native scholar Gerald Vizenor, Sounds of Survivance is hosted by Sur, a musician and music advocate of Kānaka Maoli heritage, and Tory Johnston, a Quinault-born interdisciplinary music scholar and PhD Candidate in Native American studies at the University of California, Davis.

In contrast to Teuton’s show, Sounds of Survivance airs Indigenous music of all styles, though Native jazz is a particular interest of Johnston’s, who also plays jazz guitar. On their show, listeners will hear folk resistance anthems, rock n’ roll love songs, as well as Indigenous jazz from the past and the present.

Some Native jazz artists they frequently highlight are Mexican-Apache Los Angeles jazz legend Garrett Saracho, who recently signed with the label Jazz is Dead; Winnipeg-based Ojibwe trumpeter Chuck Copenace, and Mali Obomsawin, a multi-genre bassist and citizen of the Odanak First Nation.

Johnston particularly likes one of Obomsawin’s songs called “Pedegwajois.”

“One of her ancestor relatives is just speaking Wabanaki in the recording and she's improvising bass lines over it, because she's a bass player. It's just this really beautiful moment...of her having a conversation with an ancestor in a way that she knows how, which is through the bass,” Johnston said.

Along with boosting the visibility of Native musicians, Johnston and Sur, who’ve deeply studied the Native roots of blues, rock, and jazz, are passionate about untangling the complex history of colonization, forced assimilation, and discrimination that has led to their omission from the music history books.

For one show, Sur did deep research into the story of Dave Brubeck, the legendary “Take Five” jazz pianist whose potential Modoc Indian heritage has been debated for some time. Sur, in his research, found accounts from Brubeck’s children discussing his connection to the tribe and discussing how Brubeck’s parents hid his Native heritage out of concern for his safety.

“That's the thing that you find through all these generations where it's only their children saying, oh yeah, Mildred Bailey, [she was] Coeur d'Alene. We...could not talk about being Native outside of certain circles,” Sur said.

Uplifting their own

In 2024, Teuton graduated with a double major from the University of Washington and he recently started at the university’s ethnomusicology graduate program. As he studies, he has no plans of letting Indigenous Jazz fall by the wayside and hopes to eventually put on an Indigenous jazz festival.

“ I know there are Indigenous music festivals out there but it'd be cool to see some jazz into that, because it’s really cool just to see Indigenous ways of improvising or just to see some of these artists get more recognition,” Teuton said.

Along with building out a YouTube channel for Sounds of Survivance, Johnston and Sur are also continuing to innovate how they can use their platform to elevate all aspects of Native life. On March 24, Sur hosted a show on Sounds of Survivance called Trans Native, which featured music and stories from individuals who identify as Mahū, Two-Spirit, Trans, Nonbinary, and beyond.

Indigenous Jazz can be heard on the radio dial KBFG 107.3 FM, as well as live on Daybreak Star Radio’s website and app on Thursdays from 3 to 4 p.m. PST and Sundays 12 to 1 p.m. PST. Sounds of Survivance airs live Mondays 3 to 5 a.m. on KEXP 90.3 FM and is available on-demand on KEXP’s website and app.