Jake Blount Band

“Blount is a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist…with a hauntingly gorgeous voice and a bottomless, scholarly knowledge of American musical history.”—The Los Angeles Times

A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks 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.

Blount’s latest album, The New Faith, is a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism—and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways. 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.

Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason—because it highlights important elements of the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future.