Brendan Keller-Tuberg is a forward-thinking bassist, composer and educator from Canberra, Australia. Armed with comprehensive experience in contemporary music-making of all forms, Brendan writes and performs music that blurs the lines between popular and art music, combining and recontextualising innumerable genre aesthetics to create a hybridist, unclassifiable whole.

 

Brendan’s sophomore album ‘In Spite of It All’ was released in 2021 through Shifting Paradigm Records. A deeply personal examination into the imperatives of togetherness and collectivism, it is Brendan’s most ambitious artistic statement to date. It features some of Australia’s most prominent jazz talent, such as Julien Wilson, Ashley Ballat, Wilbur Whitta and Lewis Pierre-Humbert, who are joined by an extensive list of American guest collaborators.

 

A Freedman Jazz Fellowship nominee of 2019, Brendan is in demand as both a sideman and leader. Most recently, he can be heard on records by Sam Butler, Amanda Gardier, Ana Nelson, and Ally Hocking Howe. His current projects include the chamber-pop group Finding Frances, who released their debut album ‘For Flowers Yet To Bloom’ in August 2023. ‘Branches’, Brendan’s jazz septet, focuses on the performance of improvised re-interpretations of well-known indie-folk, rock and electronica songs. As a composer, Brendan has received commissions from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, as well as the West Australian Youth Jazz Orchestra (‘WAYJO’), as their composer in residence of 2021.

 

Having graduated the Australian National University in 2018, Brendan relocated to the United States, where he received a masters’ degree in 2020 and remains a current doctoral student and Associate Instructor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Through his studies, he has received performance opportunities alongside Walter Smith III, Greg Ward, John Raymond, Emmet Cohen, Dayna Stephens, and Melissa Aldana, among others.

 

As an educator, Brendan has developed a reputation as an approachable and passionate teacher of double bass, bass guitar, composition, and theory. Honed through experience at the high school and collegiate levels, his teaching approach centers around individualised curriculums tailored to students’ musical goals and tastes – often involving comprehensive research and transcription at their request. Brendan strives to imbue students with the skills and tools to access the limitless joy of self-expression that music can provide.