About

Jody is a passionate proponent of creative live music that blurs genres and connects the sensitivity of chamber music and the spontaneous, in-the-moment magic of jazz improvisation. Over the past 18 years of working as a professional cellist, composer, vocalist, recording artist, educator and concert presenter, she has been privileged to create music and events with a vast network of inspiring musicians, visual artists, venues, audiences, and students.

Jody has performed on 5 continents at venues such as Carnegie Hall (Stern and Weill halls), Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater and Appel Room, Radio City Music Hall, Disney Hall (L.A.), Davies Symphony Hall (S.F.), Chicago Symphony Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Barbican (London), Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), Hollywood Bowl, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, and at the world’s biggest jazz festivals including Montreux, North Sea, San Francisco, Capetown South Africa, Portland, and Montreal jazz festivals, and the Village Vanguard and Tokyo’s Blue Note.

Called an "Adventurous cello songstress” (Time Out NY), Jody has been praised for her “exceptional technical command” (Steve Smith, Night After Night). She has commissioned over new 30 works for cello, voice & electronics, including pieces from some of today’s new music superstars (Anna Clyne, Missy Mazzoli, Paula Matthusen, Ted Hearne, Judd Greenstein), culminating in her solo album for voice, cello, and electronics of minutiae and memory (New Amsterdam Records), featuring 8 nuanced and immersive compositions, and named “one of the year’s 10 best albums” (Textura magazine).

Jody has worked with established new music luminaries such as the Bang on a Can founders David Lang, Michael Gordon & Julia Wolfe, and with composition-sages Terry Riley and George Crumb. In the pop world, she has performed with Neil Diamond, Enya, Sufjan Stevens, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Foxy Brown, the Roots, Meatloaf, Guster, Duncan Sheik, Dar Williams and Sara Bareilles. In the jazz world, she was a member of Esperanza Spalding’s Chamber Music Society band from 2010-2015, and has performed and recorded with Fred Hersch, Terri Lyne Carrington, Ron Carter, Andy Milne, Gino Sitson, Camila Meza, Snarky Puppy, and her GRAMMY-nominated husband, Alan Ferber.

She currently plays in a string quartet project recording & premiering new compositions by a roster of modern jazz composers; in a trio with her husband, trombonist & composer Alan Ferber, and his twin drummer Mark Ferber; and is a busy recording cellist for an array of artists. Jody has appeared on ABC's The View, the CBS Early Show, NBC's The Today Show, the Rockefeller Christmas Spectacular, Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and BET's Mo’Nique Show. You can hear her on the Super Grover segments on Sesame Street, and on the soundtrack of the HBO documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present.

As a bandleader and composer, Jody’s song cycle/album Spirit of the Garden (Sunnyside Records) celebrates botanical gardens’ roles as places of spiritual connection and healing, and features her improvising quartet Rose & the Nightingale (Sara Caswell, violin; Laila Biali, piano/voice; Leala Cyr, voice/trumpet; and Jody cello/voice/compositions).

From 2011-2016, Jody partnered with various botanical gardens around the United States in an innovative commissioning and performance project in which living American poets in different states were commissioned to craft new poems inspired by their local botanical gardens.

Jody transformed these poems into the lyrics of new songs, culminating in her song cycle Spirit of the Garden, performed nationwide at the U.S. Botanical Garden in Washington D.C., Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island (WA), the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, Magnolia Plantation (S.C.), Mount Auburn (MA), Old Westbury Gardens (Long Island), Reeves-Reed Arboretum (N.J.), the Water Conservation Garden (San Diego), Descanso Gardens (CA), and the Green Bay Botanic Garden (WI).

Recent 2023-2024 commissions include a string orchestra piece for the Westchester County All-County Intermediate Orchestra, a new work for SATB Choir + String Quartet for the Denver Choir League, and Redhage-Ferber is in process of recording a new album of her recent original chamber jazz works developed and premiered for EcoTones Concerts during the 2022-2024 seasons.

As a presenter, Jody’s current project, EcoTones Concerts, sites world-class professional musicians in natural settings with a hiking audience for one-of-a-kind performances that investigate relationships between humans and nature through music, and was named ‘Best New Concert Series of 2022’ by the Riverfront Times of St. Louis.

Jody also founded and directed the Ditmas Park Concert Series in Brooklyn, NY, a community concert series connecting world-class professional musicians living in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn with their fellow neighborhood residents and students at the two local public elementary schools, offering performances with the support of the NY State Council for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, and 36 local business sponsors, sited in 10 neighborhood venues.

With support of a Chamber Music America grant, Jody led innovative educational programming partnering the Wisconsin International School with the Green Bay Botanic Garden, leading K-5 students to craft their own nature haikus during a visit to the GBBG, and worked with the students to collaboratively turn their original poems into the lyrics of new class songs, performed at Green Bay Botanic Garden. Jody has led similar cross-disciplinary programs connecting music, students’ original poetry, and nature in Wyoming, Missouri, New Jersey, South Carolina, and New York.

Jody was the inaugural curator of the Jitterbugs Jazz for Kids series at Jazz Forum Arts in Tarrytown, NY, curating a diverse roster of world class jazz musicians to perform and lead educational programming including Tia Fuller, Ingrid Jensen, Zaccai and Lucques Curtis, Pablo Mayor, Mala Waldron, Valtinho Anastacio, and Gil Parris; the program won the 2021 Arts Westchester Award for Best Educational Programming.