Jake Blount + Mali Obomsawin
Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin are award-winning musicians who have joined forces on their Smithsonian Folkways release, “symbiont” (2024). Blount (pronounced “blunt”) is a renowned interpreter of Black folk music who is recognized for his skill as a string band musician and for his unprecedented Afrofuturist work in sound archives and song collections. In his hands, the banjo, fiddle, electric guitar, and synthesizer become ceremonial objects used to channel the insurgent creativity of his forebears. Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) is a celebrated composer, bassist, and vocalist in free jazz and experimental music. Obomsawin’s work as a composer and bandleader centers on the imprint of Indigenous music traditions in jazz and “American” genres, using historical, archival, and community research as a spine for improvisation.
On “symbiont,” Obomsawin’s and Blount’s “genrequeer” approach to their respective traditions has earned a place in some of the very same archives from which they extract their repertoire. In defiance of genre categories, revisionist histories, and linear time, Blount and Obomsawin have fashioned an Indigenous and Afrofuturist folklore that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.
General Admission tickets: $25 (+ $2 online processing fee) Pay-what-you-can tickets are available to our community members. Your ticket purchase in any amount directly supports FirstWorks connecting art with audiences.
Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.
