Brenda Gifford

Brenda Gifford (born 1968) is an Australian Yuin classical composer, saxophonist and pianist. She was a member of the Australian rock band Mixed Relations. She is based in Canberra and was an archivist in the Indigenous Collection Branch of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). Career Gifford was born in 1968 and grew up in Sydney and Wreck Bay, near Jervis Bay, New South Wales. Beginning in the late 1980s Gifford played saxophone and piano as a member of the band Mixed Relations with Bart Willoughby. During the 1990s she contributed to Kev Carmody’s 1991 album Eulogy (For A Black Person), and taught music at Eora College in Redfern, New South Wales. She left her teaching job to focus on the band as it became more popular. Mixed Relations toured internationally and gained local success when their single Aboriginal Woman reached #89 on Triple J’s Hottest 100 in 1993. The group disbanded by the end of the 1990s, and after a break of several years, Gifford began a new career as a composer. In 2016, Gifford participated in the AMPlify Indigenous Composer Initiative pilot program, which aimed to support the creation of new work by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander