Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin
Groundbreaking Indigenous and Afrofuturist folk.
Summer 2024The two award-winning musicians team up for an evening of innovative and soul-stirring sound from their upcoming release, symbiont (2024). Their "genrequeer" approach defies categorization, disintegrating boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.
Blount, a masterful interpreter of Black folk music, seamlessly blends tradition with Afrofuturist innovation, wielding banjo, fiddle, electric guitar and synthesizer as ceremonial instruments of insurgent creativity. Meanwhile, Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation), infuses free jazz and experimental music with the spirit of Indigenous traditions. Obomsawin, alumna of the Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth, is celebrated for her evocative compositions and groundbreaking debut Sweet Tooth (2022).
This performance is co-sponsored by the Music Department and The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation.
Related Event
Discover African American & Indigenous String Music Repertoire in a workshop with the Upper Valley Music Center on July 9 from 7-8 pm. All instruments are welcome. This event is free and open to the public.
A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount (pronounced blunt) 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. 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. Jake Blount's new album, The New Faith, is a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways (released September 23, 2022). Learn more>
Mali Obomsawin is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and a citizen of Odanak First Nation (W8banaki). She is a versatile bassist, composer and vocalist whose work spans from jazz and roots music to film scoring, teaching, and indie-shoegaze. Mali is based in Portland, Maine, and is an international touring artist with her own projects and as an accompanist.
Her current touring projects include the shoegaze duo Deerlady, now supporting their latest release Greatest Hits (2024); the free-jazz band she leads under her own name, and the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band. Mali's film score on the highly anticipated documentary Sugarcane (Nat Geo) directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie is also featuring at film festivals across the world throughout 2024.
Over the years Mali has been lucky to work with notable musicians including Taylor Ho Bynum, Peter Apfelbaum, Craig Harris, Bill Cole, Althea Sully-Cole, Susan Hagen, Tomas Fujiwara, Mike Formanek, among others. Learn more>
Blount is a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist... with a hauntingly gorgeous voice and a bottomless, scholarly knowledge of American musical history.
The Los Angeles Times
Obomsawin aims to shine a light on the largely hidden history of Indigenous jazz.
WNYC
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