Jada Brown brings love letter to her Ojibwe roots at Fine Line

Ring in the new year with arts and music events across the Twin Cities. Highlights include a show at the Fine Line featuring Native musicians, hoop dancing and Indigenous fashion; saxophonist Karl Denson performing two jazz shows at the Dakota; and a mini-comics workshop led by a Peruvian artist at the Eastside Food Co-op. 

Twin Cities rapper Jada Brown turns grief into song

Local Native artists will take over the Fine Line on Saturday for KOJB’s third annual Anishinaabe Music and Arts Celebration. The daylong event will feature Indigenous hoop dancing, a fashion show and music sets from folk and blues musician Keith Secola, singer-songwriter Annie Humphrey, rapper Tall Paul and rock band Shadows in Stereo. 

For the first time, singer-songwriter Jada Brown is bringing her own full live band to the stage to flesh out her modern soul blend of R&B and hip-hop, drawing inspiration from artists including Amy Winehouse and Erykah Badu. 

Brown grew up in St. Michael, Minnesota, and is Ojibwe through her grandfather, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She began singing and dancing at home before performing on Twin Cities stages. 

As a teenager “music really helped me become more expressive and confident in my story as a shy person,” she said. “Ojibwe’s worldview is that we all come here with gifts and it’s important to honor those gifts. So I feel like music is something I will always embark on.”

After moving to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota and immerse herself in the city’s music scene, Brown released her soulful debut album, “Admiration” in 2019. But her 2024 EP “Far From Anonymous” marked a turn toward rap — a shift inspired by the death of her partner, Travis James Varney Jr., to a fentanyl overdose. 

“Grief isn’t an event. It’s a process and there’s a lot of grief in Indigenous communities with the opioid crisis going on,” Brown said. “I wanted to use my gift of singing to not only help myself but help others who are experiencing that pain of losing someone to fentanyl.”

The EP’s tracklist functions as a series of love letters to the support system that kept her afloat. On “Auntie’s Advice,” Brown taps into the intergenerational wisdom of the women in her family. Meanwhile, “First Steps” finds her dissecting her own relationship with her father to help process the legacy her late partner left behind for his own children. 

“People have come up to me and told me that they lost their loved ones to fentanyl and that the song spoke to them or helped them in a certain way,” Brown said. “That lets me know the songs are doing what they’re meant to do.” 

After performing at reservations and communities across the state, Brown is ready to scale up. At the KOJB showcase, she’ll perform new music that tackles relationships and the act of taking up space. 

Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe

Saxophonist and singer Karl Denson has been making music for more than 40 years, and he brings his band, Tiny Universe, to the Dakota in Minneapolis for two evening shows of funk, jazz, blues and soul. Denson toured with Lenny Kravitz from the late 1980s through 2008 and played with the Rolling Stones in the 2010s. Known for his improvisation and rhythmic performances, he’s played festivals from New Orleans Jazz Fest and Japan’s Fuji Rock to Bonnaroo in Tennessee and San Francisco’s Outside Lands. 

Telling stories in panels

Minneapolis-based Peruvian artist Albert Chacon Salas will lead a mini-comic book workshop at the Eastside Food Co-op on Sunday, guiding participants through creating panels, sequencing stories and developing character-driven narratives. Salas’ work explores human relationships with animals through fantastical and science fiction comics, as well as mixed-media pieces.