Jake Blount is an award-winning, Providence-based musician and scholar specializing in the early folk music of Black Americans. He’s performed at the Newport Folk Festival, was recently featured on NPR Tiny Desk concert series, and regularly tours around the U.S. and beyond. His latest work, “The New Faith” is an Afrofuturist concept album that draws on traditional Black music from the past to create music from the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You can see Jake Feb. 24 at the University of Rhode Island, and April 20 at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River. Details at jakeblount.com.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: Listening to, you know, the latest album, “The New Faith,” it’s really unique. And it’s nothing like I’ve ever heard. But I kept thinking, wait a minute, this sounds like something I have heard. And it just reminded me of spirituals. And I wondered what, for you, what are the roots of the music that you make? Where did this come from?
Jake Blount: Well, those are old, old spirituals. They’re all things that I’ve dug up in different archives and collections. I spend a lot of time going through old books and collections of recorded music that were made by folklorists back in the day, finding those old songs and then rearranging them in new ways. And that’s what went on in “The New Faith.” So that album takes a bunch of those old spirituals, and then kind of reimagines them for a future for Black people post-climate crisis. So after all of the changes we’ve set in motion have happened. So it was this interesting process of taking these very old songs, reimagining them for the future, and then finding a way to take the modern sounds and modern production techniques that would have found their way in there, and then rendering them onto acoustic instruments. It was a very fun back and forth along the timeline. I’m working with old recordings that come from say, you know, the 1970s, all the way back to the 1670s. There’s a really broad stretch of time that I worked into this one thing. So you know, yes, I’m collaborating with all these people who are alive. Now I’m also collaborating with Mr. Baptiste, who’s the enslaved African musician who transcribed a bunch of banjo tunes in Jamaica in 1678. And those tunes made it onto the record.
[MUSIC: “The Downward Road,” from Blount’s recent Tiny Desk performance]
Hernandez: It has that feel of spirituals, but is there something spiritual for you in this? Because my understanding is you turned away from religion a long time ago. Was there anything spiritual about this in the creation of this music?
Blount: I think so. And I think one of the things that I’ve struggled with –and that a lot of other artists I know who share my background struggle with – is that, you know, as a queer person I haven’t really felt invited in by my own religious community throughout my life. And I have felt very attached to these spirituals, to the songs that come out of that context, because they’re this extremely important historical text, you know, for Black people, our ancestors, they weren’t legally allowed to read and write, right? They didn’t have the ability to pass down a written record of the things they thought and felt. And even if they had, they would have had to heavily edit it so that they wouldn’t have been killed for writing it. I have always wanted to find a way to interact with them that didn’t feel constrained by the regressive doctrine of the church institution that surrounds them a lot of the time. And I think that imagining those songs for a new context let me work with that repertoire in a way that didn’t feel like I could be shut out of it. It felt like I took away other people’s power to tell me that I couldn’t use those songs. And that was really nice.
[MUSIC: “City Called Heaven,” from Blount’s recent Tiny Desk performance]
James Baumgartner: “The New Faith” takes place in the future. And I know that Afrofuturism is one of the themes that you work with in your music, as well as traditional folk music, and those might seem to be at odds a little bit. So how do you describe Afrofuturism? And how does it fit in with the early Black American folk music that you work with?
Blount: I think of Afrofuturism not necessarily just as a genre, but as an approach to imagining a future that looks a little bit different than the conventional science fiction or futuristic narratives that we’re used to. There are a lot of cool things there. I understand everyone wants a spaceship, right? I’m down. But Afrofuturism gives us a lens to imagine the future through the perspectives of other people who, realistically, right, if the Galactic Empire existed, like we wouldn’t be in the power structure. And you see that borne out in those depictions right there. Like there’s one Black guy in “Star Wars,” right? So it’s a way of imagining a new future. And one that is able to embrace more possibilities than just the systems that we have right now that, candidly, are not really working right now, continuing unabated for centuries or millennia into the future.
Hernandez: But is the album like a prediction of some post-apocalyptic world where humans are gone because of the climate disaster? Because I want to get a sense of what you’re envisioning this future is supposed to be.
Blount: Well, so this is the funny thing about this record, is I talk to people about itn and so often it gets described as post-apocalyptic. But in my head, the defining premise of the album is that nothing significant happens between now and the time in the future. There is no doomsday event, and there is no salvation, we just continue to do things the way that we’ve been doing them. And as a result, the seas get emptied of life, right? Desertification renders large parts of the planet uninhabitable or unarable, and people have to move to find food, to find a stable climate. Storms are battering the East Coast [and] change where people are living and how they’re living. There are all sorts of things that seem quite clear to me to be consequences of the way that we’re living right now. And the album really imagines those.
[MUSIC: “Give up the world,” from Blount’s recent Tiny Desk performance]
Hernandez: Are you hopeful for the future? How do you view the future?
Blount: I’m always, like, careful about how I talk about this. Because on one hand, I really, I find it hard to think about the future, without trying to be realistic with myself. It’s part of preparing myself for tough times, I guess. But also, you don’t want to fall into the trap of like climate doomism, because there’s a lot of stuff that we could do. You know, I’m, I think what I said in the album is that we have the tools we need to avert this future, and we’re probably not going to use them. People aren’t able to really conceive of a future where we don’t just push everything to 11 all the time, and continue to grow and continue to extract. And I don’t know if I see that changing fast enough. I think there’s a time limit. And it doesn’t feel like there’s enough urgency, or that the infrastructure exists to deal with this globally as a species in the way that we’re going to have to if we’re going to fix it.
[MUSIC: “Didn’t it Rain,” from Blount’s recent Tiny Desk performance]
Hernandez: What do you want to play?
Blount: I’m going to play a song called “I Wonder Where is My Brother Gone?” that I learned from a recording by a woman called Annie Grace Horn Dodson, and kind of combined with a fiddle tune along the way that stopped being the fiddle tune it was, and now it’s just me doing what I want.
[MUSIC: “I Wonder Where Is My Brother Gone,” performed live in studio]
Hernandez: Awesome.
Baumgartner: That was beautiful, thank you.
Blount: Thanks for having me.
