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Saturday Night -- 7:00 to 8:00pm

Jake Blount

So begins the parable at the heart of Jake Blount’s new album The New Faith, a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways (coming 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. Most importantly, it snaps us out of our tragically limited historical vantage point to better understand our actions and culture as they exist in deep time. If singing songs together as a community reminds us of who we are and where we come from, Blount harnesses that power to show us what may be remembered when our connection to our natural environment is severed – when our relationships with Death and each other are transformed into something more beautiful and more horrifying than anything we could have imagined. 


Jake Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. He is a scholar of Black American music, speaking 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. Each song Blount plays 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. 


That future has become Blount’s focus on The New Faith. Conceived, written, and recorded during the darkest months of COVID-lockdowns, the album answers the question, “What would Black music sound like after climate change renders most of the world uninhabitable? What gods would this community praise, and what stories would they tell?” Centering the album around radical arrangements of traditional songs, Blount draws connections between the plights of Black Americans and the horrors of enduring the disproportionate burden of the looming climate catastrophe. The songs have origins that span centuries and come from a broad array of figures: enslaved individuals whose names had been violently stripped from the historical record, civil rights activist and organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, trailblazer and queer icon Sister Rosetta Tharpe, peerlessly expressive gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and blues paragons Skip James and Blind 

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Saturday Night -- 8:30 to 9:45pm

Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper

The world tends to look at accomplishments in the form of accolades and Michael Cleveland has plenty to his credit, including a 2019 GRAMMY. After picking up the fiddle at age 4, Michael’s musical momentum began to propel him forward towards early success. “When I started taking lessons at age 4,” he remembers, “I told the teacher right up front that I wanted to learn how to play bluegrass and I wanted to play ‘Orange Blossom Special.'" Reluctant as they were, his teachers quickly found reason to his rhyme, helping him progress to the point when, at age 9, Michael was invited to sit in with the legendary Bill Monroe at the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival. Soon after, he brought his virtuosic style to the Grand Ole Opry as a guest of Alison Kraus, and was handpicked for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) Bluegrass Youth Allstars before he was 14. His blistering prowess and technical fluency have since marked him as a sought-after musician, leading to performances with Vince Gill, Marty Stuart, Tim O’Brien, J.D. Crowe and the New South, Andy Statman, and The Kruger Brothers in recent years. However, it wasn’t until 2006, when Michael formed his own band Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper, that he found the right vehicle for his musical vision, and he hasn’t rested since, constantly looking for new ways to push himself and his music forward.  


“He plays fearless and it’s intoxicating to play with him because he makes you play fearless,” says Country Music Hall of Famer Vince Gill. “He takes no prisoners but he plays with a restraint and a soul. He plays without abandon.” Clearly, the IBMA agrees as he’s their most awarded Fiddle Player of the Year with 12 wins, has won Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year six times, and fronts their 7-Time Instrumental Group of the Year. And, Cleveland is a 2018 Inductee to the National Fiddler Hall of Fame. Together with Flamekeeper members Josh Richards (guitar), Nathan Livers (mandolin), Jasiah Shrode (banjo) and Chris Douglas (bass), 

Five men standing with one holding a fiddle.

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