
Jake Blount Pre-Show Events
Sat, Feb 08
|Chandler Center for the Arts
4 PM: Gallery Walk - Meet VT Artists Exhibiting in Smithsonian's "Crossroads" 5 PM: Talk with Jake Blount - The Black roots of American folk music 6 PM: Community Potluck 7 PM: Concert with Ida Mae and John Specker opening 7:45 PM: Jake Blount trio performance


Time & Location
Feb 08, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Chandler Center for the Arts, 71 N Main St, Randolph, VT 05060, USA
About the event
Blount’s recent release by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, The New Faith, was named one of the best roots albums by Rolling Stone, NPR, The Guardian and more. Initially recognized for his skill as a string band musician – winner of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize and two first-place ribbons from Clifftop – Blount’s still-young career has “charted an unprecedented, Afrofuturist course” that “disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.”
His performances are frequently paired with an educational session where he shares insight from his original research and the history of Black string band music. Currently a PhD student in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University, his undergraduate thesis while studying at Hamilton College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania was titled “Fiddles in the North Country: Uncovering the Ithaca Sound.” Paired perfectly with Blount, February 8 show opener John Specker is known as the “father of the…