Michelle Jacques has traveled the world as a musical ambassador representing the deepest wellsprings of Black American music. Embracing her musical heritage at midlife after a successful administrative career, the New Orleans-born vocalist performed at far-flung festivals and concert halls with a cappella ensembles such as Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir, SoVoSo and Street Sounds.

At home in the Bay Area, the 69-year-old has played hundreds of community gigs and school performances leading her own a cappella group Juke Joint and her rollicking Gulf Coast combo Chelle and Friends. So it seems more than fitting that Jacques’ most ambitious musical undertaking yet, “Daughters of the Delta,” comes by way of a commission from the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Featuring an array of songs by female African American composers and musicians hailing from Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the world premiere of “Daughters of the Delta” kicks off SFIAF’s summer concert series Saturday, June 11, at Oakland’s Plymouth Jazz and Justice Church (with a reprise performance Sunday, June 12). The program explores spirituals, gospel, jazz and blues to showcase the contributions of songwriters and performers like Lil Hardin Armstrong, Lizzie Miles and Blue Lu Barker, who wrote and recorded “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” a song reintroduced by Maria Muldaur on her 1973 debut album.

Jacques said she created “Daughters of the Delta” to reclaim the legacy of women whose contributions have been overlooked and undervalued, noting that gospel music star Mahalia Jackson’s renown has endured “but not Alberta Bradford, a former slave who sang and recorded more than 100 spirituals, including some with Becky Elzy recorded by Alan Lomax in 1934,” she told The Chronicle. “I was able to find those ladies going through the Library of Congress.”

The music captures the bountiful creative spirit carried out of the South by Black people looking for opportunities during the Great Migration. Set to new arrangements, the songs are brought to life by the East Bay team that Jacques assembled to pull the production together, starting with Grammy Award-winning producer Greg Landau, co-creator and researcher Cava Menzies, and music director and vocalist Bryan Dyer, who’s worked with Jacques since the early 1990s. Combining the musicians from her Juke Joint and Chelle and Friends, the ensemble includes local vocalists Rhonda Crane, Tammi Brown and Jay Lamont, along with multi-instrumentalist Donna Viscuso, percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz, bassist Kevin Scott and guitarist Eric Swinderman.

“Michelle is always open to ideas and getting different viewpoints,” Dyer said. “This project means a lot to her. As a woman from New Orleans, this is her history, and she infused this project with her thirst for knowledge.”

Born and raised in the Ninth Ward, Jacques grew up surrounded by music and Crescent City culture. Her mother worked at the Old Coffee Pot, the historic breakfast spot in the French Quarter, and her father played trumpet in local brass combos. An uncle who moved to the Bay Area during World War II to work in the war industries set in motion their migration westward.

“He told the family this is the place to be,” Jacques said. “In New Orleans my mother was never able to buy a home. Here, my mother owns three homes.”

A dedicated educator, Jacques spent two decades on the music faculty of San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program and just finished a three-year stint teaching at Oakland School for the Arts. She also serves on the board of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and the Governors Board of the Recording Academy’s San Francisco Chapter.

It was the Recording Academy connection that brought her together with Andrew Wood, founder and executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Throughout the pandemic he spearheaded efforts to present live music, dance and theater outdoors while pushing against San Francisco health directives (a struggle that led SFIAF to file a federal lawsuit in 2020 seeking First Amendment protections for the arts). In her role with the academy, Jacques worked with Wood as a conduit for information about aerosols and COVID spread.

But Wood was also familiar with Jacques’ history with Tillery, whose Cultural Heritage Choir received one of the festival’s first commissions, “Concertizing the Golden Triangle.” While the organization is best known for presenting international dance and theater artists who would otherwise be unlikely to perform in San Francisco, SFIAF has provided a major boost to Bay Area artists like playwright Paul Flores and Culture Clash’s Ric Salinas, whose festival-commissioned production about Salvadoran immigrants, “Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo,” went on tour in 15 American cities in 2014.

“When we’ve produced events, they’ve tended to look at parts of American history that aren’t often told, and when I heard Michelle’s idea for a project on music by women from Louisiana, it fit right into what we do,” Wood said. “There are iconic historical references to the Great Migration, fascinating and illuminating stories that should be in the curriculum. Michelle and Cava are master educators, and they tell these stories in an uplifting, exhilarating way.”

Jacques is such a prodigious resource that she’s taken on a major role in another SFIAF production, providing a live score for the U.S. premiere of German performance artist David Brandstätter’s “Freiheit,” set at CounterPulse for a date yet to be determined. (It was originally set for June 17-19, but SFIAF announced Thursday, June 9, that it has postponed the production to October because Brandstätter’s nonresident work visa “has not been processed by the United States Customs and Immigration Service in a timely manner.”)

A conceptual circus-arts act in which the suspended Brandstätter reconfigures the white porcelain cups on which he precariously balances, “Freiheit” takes on new meaning as Jacques sings songs like Richie Havens’ “Freedom” and Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” (a tune she explains he wrote in response to the late 1960s civil rights struggle).

“When he (Brandstätter) came to me, he let me pick out the songs. While he’s dancing on the cups, I’m doing a lot of reading and singing, and we’re doing a lot of interacting. I’m a ham. I admit it,” she said, with a laugh. “It’s all about freedom, and all about love and light.”

“Daughters of the Delta”:8 p.m. Saturday, June 11; 2 p.m. Sunday, June 12. $20/$25. Plymouth Jazz and Justice Church, 424 Monte Vista Ave., Oakland.www.sfiaf.org

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that “Freiheit” has been postponed to the fall.