Last Wednesday was kind of a homecoming for Jake Blount (he/they). They told the crowd at The Pinhook here in Durham that years ago they played his first professional show in Durham, North Carolina. The concert was the kickoff of Jake’s tour in support of his forthcoming album The New Faith, one of the best records I have heard this year.
The New Faith is an Afrofuturist consideration of our ongoing climate catastrophe. Jake alluded to the speculative fiction of N.K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler, but also reminded us that Afrofuturism has been around for a long while–ever since the invention of race. They shared scholar Isiah Lavender III’s notion that science fiction is exactly how Black people should engage with the world, because the entire idea of Blackness, and race, is a fiction rooted in (junk) science. And while it is true that all racial categories are science fiction, the creativity, imagination, and determination that manifests in Black art quite literally creates new ways of knowing, dreaming, and creating–because it has taken all of that creativity, imagination, and determination to quite literally survive. What might it take to survive our current moment? As Jake noted in the concert, those who are in positions of power should listen to people who have had the answers for a long time.
He remarked that while the songs sound new, he is actually working with some of the oldest material of his career. “Once There Was No Sun,” takes its inspiration from Genesis and implies a warning that the darkness the world came from could be where we’re heading. Jake read an excerpt of “Interlude 2: A Poem For Children With Thoughts on Death,” by Jupiter Hammon, the first Black poet ever published in the United States. And they includes spirituals such as “Didn’t It Rain,” which Jake says they learned from the queer Black icon (and inventor of rock and roll) Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Jake used sampled beats to create driving percussion in these new songs, pairing them with his incredible band and his own virtuosic playing and singing. I loved the way Nelson Williams was freed up on bass to explore runs because of the samples. Gus Tritsch switched effortlessly between banjo-ukulele and a haunting electric guitar, and George Jackson was stunning on fiddle and banjo. Jake said that they are finding new ways to be a string band and it really feels like this group could go in any musical direction and find their place.
This night of music was restorative and challenging in the best way, confronting us with the need to think in new ways and giving us sounds to invite that thinking. Jake is on tour and you should absolutely get out to a show. The New Faith is out on Smithsonian Folkways on September 23.
Check out more photos here!