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.