Jake Blount, Nic Gareiss and Sammy Wetstein Trio

Blount, Gareiss, and Wetstein's years of experience as performers, educators, and scholars in their respective traditions have drawn them close to the spontaneous creative force at the heart of music-making. The trio brings the power of those fresh bonds to bear in a new performance: a paean to both strong roots and musical co-infatuations traced in wood, flesh, and gesture. Enjoy this performance of: We're Gonna Hunt the Buffalo by Jake Blount and Nic Gareiss.

Winner of the 2021 Steve Martin Banjo Prize, Smithsonian Folkways recording artist Jake Blount 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.

Percussive dancer Nic Gareiss (Lansing, MI) has been named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” and has been hailed by the New York Times for their “dexterous melding of Irish and Appalachian dance.” In 2020, Gareiss received the Michigan Heritage Award, the highest honor his home state bestows on traditional artists. 

Sammy Wetstein (Boston, MA) is a musician who infuses folk and jazz music with improvisational creativity. Sammy has performed at the Newport Folk Festival, The Shalin Liu Performance Center, and the International Bluegrass Music Association conference, and has appeared alongside artists jazz icons Joe Levano and Kenny Barron, and world-renowned string players including Eugene Friesen, Darol Anger, and Jason Anick. He is currently a student at Berklee College of Music focusing on jazz and roots cello performance.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM:

"Jake Blount, one of the new generation, has just dropped "Spider Tales", this powerful collection of roots and old time music, unflinchingly reminding us all of the black and indigenous co-creation of this music that is now perceived as so white. On top of being wildly intelligent and knowledgeable, he's also a killer musician and it's an incredible combo." -Rhiannon Giddens, the GRAMMY Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and scholar who contributed banjo, and viola to Beyoncé's recent blockbuster country music album: Cowboy Carter.