Saturday, November 12, 7:30 (7 door): Jake Blount, Smithsonian Folkways Album Release Tour (Tickets $20 Now On Sale; drop by the store or call 541-345-8986 to reserve)
Jake and his band first performed at Tsunami Books in April before an SRO crowd. His five minute fiddle solo to begin the second set has to be one of the greatest examples ever of Appalachian Trance Music.
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Blount is touring in celebration of his new Album.
“After humanity’s debt to the planet came due, our ancestors crawled from the wreckage of their sunken cities and out of the deserts where once they had grown food enough for millions. Chance brought 30 survivors together, hundreds of miles to the south of here. Worn down by storms and starvation, they set their sights northward, and followed the coast to find a new home...”
So begins the parable at the heart of Jake Blount’s new album The New Faith, a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways (coming September 23, 2022). The New Faith is spiritual music, filled with hope for salvation and righteous anger in equal measure. The album manifests our worst fears on the shores of an island in Maine, where Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change. Most importantly, it snaps us out of our tragically limited historical vantage point to better understand our actions and culture as they exist in deep time. If singing songs together as a community reminds us of who we are and where we come from, Blount harnesses that power to show us what may be remembered when our connection to our natural environment is severed – when our relationships with Death and each other are transformed into something more beautiful and more horrifying than anything we could have imagined.
Jake Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. He is a scholar of Black American music, speaking ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon. Each song Blount plays is chosen for a reason - because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment.Jake Blount is an award-winning banjoist, fiddler, singer and scholar based in Providence, RI. He is half of the internationally touring duo Tui, and a 2020 recipient of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize. He is a two-time winner and many-time finalist of the Appalachian String Band Music Festival (better known as Clifftop). Although he is proficient in multiple performance styles, he specializes in the music of Black and indigenous communities in the southeastern United States, and in the regional style of Ithaca, New York. He foregrounds the experiences of queer people and people of color in his work. He has studied with modern masters of old-time music, including Bruce Molsky, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins (of the GRAMMY-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops).
https://jakeblount.com/home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKdlclWxOpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0b9Av19klA
