“Blount is a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist…
with a hauntingly gorgeous voice and a bottomless, scholarly knowledge of American musical history.”

— Katherine Proctor, The Los Angeles Times

Jake Blount (pronounced: blunt) is an award-winning interpreter of Black folk music based in Providence, RI. Initially recognized for his skill as a string band musician, Blount has charted an unprecedented, Afrofuturist course on his pilgrimage through 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. From transfixing solo sets to full-band festival appearances complete with crowd-surfing and ecstatic chants, Blount’s performances – like his recent Smithsonian Folkways release, The New Faith – seamlessly merge centuries-old traditional songs with the trappings and techniques of modern Black genres. This “genrequeer” approach to the traditions has earned his music a place in the very same archives from which he extracts his repertoire. In defiance of genre categories, revisionist histories and linear time, Blount fashions an “Afrofuturist folklore” that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.

Balancing his taste for arcane source material with his desire to reach diverse audiences, Blount has shared his music at venues including Carnegie Hall, Newport Folk Festival, the Library of Congress and NPR’s Tiny Desk. His knowledge and skill have deepened over the course of his still-young career, and his vision has grown more ambitious – but his music has only grown in popular appeal. Blount’s debut solo record, Spider Tales, was ranked among the best of 2020 by outlets including Bandcamp and The New Yorker. NPR, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and more named The New Faith one of the best roots releases of 2022. With the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, two International Folk Music Awards nominations and two first-place ribbons from Clifftop already under his belt, Blount’s star continues to rise.

Blount’s thoughtful musicianship has made him a sought-after collaborator. He has contributed to recordings by Adia Victoria, Dave Hause, Adeem The Artist and others, opened for GRAMMY-winners Rhiannon Giddens and Molly Tuttle, and traveled the world as a member of old-time groups Tui and The Moose Whisperers. He regularly shares the stage with skilled contemporaries such as Mali Obomsawin, George Jackson and Nic Gareiss, and recently collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on their sold-out 50th Anniversary performance at Carnegie Hall.

In addition to his public-facing achievements, Blount has an impressive industry track record. He has performed as an official showcase artist at Folk Alliance International, SXSW, AmericanaFest and the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass. He was a 2020 Strathmore Artist In Residence, and participated in the IBMA’s Leadership Bluegrass program in the same year. An emeritus board member of Bluegrass Pride, Blount is known as a strong advocate for progressive causes within the music industry, and appears regularly on conference panels pertaining to social and environmental justice. His writings on music and issues facing the industry have appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, NPR, Paste Magazine and No Depression.

Blount is also a skilled educator. In addition to his on-stage offerings, his engagements frequently include lectures and presentations pertaining to both his original research and the history of Black string band music. He has shared this work at Yale University, Berklee College of Music, the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere. He also makes regular appearances at music camps, most notably Earful of Fiddle Music & Dance Camp, offering hands-on instruction in fiddle and banjo. As of fall 2023, Blount is a Ph.D. student in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University.

Blount performs on a five-string fiddle made by Nathaniel Rowan, and banjos from Seeders Instruments and Pete Ross Banjos. His CV is available here.

Jamille Pinheiro Dias is currently the director of the Centre of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILSC) at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where she also works as a Lecturer. In addition, she is a researcher affiliated with the Amazon Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, where she was previously a von der Heyden Fellow, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the University of London, she worked as a Research Associate at the University of Manchester as part of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her studies involve environmental issues, Amazonian cultural production, Indigenous arts, and translation studies in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. Prior to working in the UK, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of São Paulo, where she also received a PhD in English. Furthermore, she was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and a teaching assistant at the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo. Besides her engagement in teaching and research, her work as a translator led her to translate authors such as Ailton Krenak, Marilyn Strathern, Alfred Gell, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Judith Butler and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, among others.

Adrienne Taylor, Resident Musician, Community MusicWorks

Adrienne, a cellist, draws inspiration from collaborations with other artists in music, theater, and dance. Performance collaborations include Trinity Repertory Company, Newport Contemporary Ballet, the Kronos Quartet, the Sphinx Virtuosi and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. Adrienne has written, performed and improvised music with dancer/choreographers Danielle Davidson, Heidi Henderson and Shura Baryshnikov. A recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship for composition, Adrienne wrote Lullabies for string quartet, premiered by the MusicWorks Collective in their 2023-24 season. Adrienne’s work as a performer and composer directly inspires her work coaching the CMW Youth Alliance, a youth-led ensemble where young musicians and teachers rehearse and perform intensively together, playing chamber music, improvising, and telling stories through music.

Sebastian Ruth, Founder & Artistic Director / Resident Musician at Community MusicWorks

Sebastian is a musician, educator, and organizer whose work explores roles for music making in society today. As CMW’s Founder & Artistic Director, Sebastian has worked alongside colleagues to create musical experiences and programs that are always evolving and responding to the needs of young people and the world around us.

As a violinist and violist, Sebastian is a member of the MusicWorks Collective. He was a founder member of the Providence String Quartet at CMW and has had the opportunity to collaborate with the Borromeo, Kronos, Muir, Miro, Orion, and Turtle Island String Quartets, and musicians Emanuel Ax, Jonathan Biss, Kim Kashkashian, Frank Rosenwein, and Johnny Gandelsman.

Among his mentors and inspiring teachers, Sebastian is grateful to have learned from Rolfe Sokol, Eric Rosenblith, Lois Finkel, Maxine Greene, Ted Sizer, and others.

In addition to his work at CMW, Sebastian serves as a Visiting Lecturer at the Yale School of Music, created an online course “Music and Social Action” on the Coursera platform for over 20,000 learners, and was a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. In 2019 Sebastian was honored to participate in the RISD Museum’s show “Raid the Icebox II,” curating exhibits with original musical content. Sebastian’s TedX talk “Music, Community, and Creating Space for Unexpected Possibilities” is available online.

Sebastian is married to violinist Minna Choi and is a father to two awesome children.

Photo credits: Jake Blount by Abby Lank, Adrienne Taylor and Sebastian Ruth by Erin X. Smithers