Jake Blount

UNITED Gallery Events Space

Join us for a special evening of music in the UNITED Gallery events space with Jake Blount, an award-winning scholar, Afrofuturist, and performer of Black folk music hosted by roots musician Craig Edwards.

Doors: 6:00pm – Show: 7:00pm – all ages  

Tickets: $15 

Jake Blount website / Follow@ Instagram/Facebook

Jake Blount (pronounced: blunt) is an award-winning scholar and performer of Black folk music based in Providence, RI. Initially recognized for his skill as a string band musician, Blount has charted an unprecedented, Afrofuturist course on his pilgrimage through sound archives and song collections. In his hands, the banjo, fiddle, electric guitar and synthesizer become ceremonial objects used to channel the insurgent creativity of his forebears. From transfixing solo sets to full-band festival appearances complete with crowd-surfing and ecstatic chants, Blount’s performances – like his recent Smithsonian Folkways releases, symbiont (2024) and The New Faith (2022) – seamlessly merge centuries-old traditional songs with the trappings and techniques of modern Black genres. This “genrequeer” approach to the traditions has earned his music a place in the very same archives from which he extracts his repertoire. In defiance of genre categories, revisionist histories and linear time, Blount fashions an “Afrofuturist folklore” that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.