The Sofia Presents
Jake Blount Band
W/ special guest Hannah Mayree
music series - Jake Blount Band - 01/18/2024 at 7:00 pm
Jake Blount Band
W/ special guest Hannah Mayree
Spider Tales - named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker.
5-star review from The Guardian.
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. His 2020 album Spider Tales 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). 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. Jake 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 about 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.
Hannah Mayree
Hannah Mayree (she/her/they/them) is a creative facilitator and musician who's work and art lends itself as a tool for redesigning and reconnecting to our roots as humans on this planet. A banjoist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and vocalist, Hannah shares original and traditional banjo compositions as well as harmonies through acoustic live vocal looping and reminds us of the power found in our relationship to the earth, music and community. They founded and creatively direct the Black Banjo Reclamation Project which is currently creating musical, cultural and land-based opportunities for Black, Afro-Diasporic communities around the world to work with the banjo as a tool for reclaiming ancestral wisdom & creating Afro-futures.
5-star review from The Guardian.
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. His 2020 album Spider Tales 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). 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. Jake 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 about 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.
Hannah Mayree
Hannah Mayree (she/her/they/them) is a creative facilitator and musician who's work and art lends itself as a tool for redesigning and reconnecting to our roots as humans on this planet. A banjoist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and vocalist, Hannah shares original and traditional banjo compositions as well as harmonies through acoustic live vocal looping and reminds us of the power found in our relationship to the earth, music and community. They founded and creatively direct the Black Banjo Reclamation Project which is currently creating musical, cultural and land-based opportunities for Black, Afro-Diasporic communities around the world to work with the banjo as a tool for reclaiming ancestral wisdom & creating Afro-futures.
Doors open 1 hour prior to showtime. This show is All Ages
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