Banjo player, fiddler, singer, and scholar Jake Blount’s latest feat is an Afro-futurist concept album called The New Faith, where instead of shiny interstellar travel, man-made climate crises reach their logical end points, and a small community survives, staying lifted by the sacred songs of the past. Blount presents the music of this imagined community as a religious service in three sections, captured as a future field recording - one with a direct through-line to folk, gospel, the blues, and spirituals. The tie-in with Octavia Butler’s visionary 1993 work of climate/science fiction, Parable of the Sower, is explicit, says Blount, as this album may well be the first musical Afro-futurist cautionary tale (some might say dystopia, but that would imply that there was a utopia to begin with.)

The collected and re-cast songs on The New Faith have been deeply researched (just as they were on his excellent 2020 record, Spider Tales) and show profound respect invoking and honoring the ancestors: Bessie Jones of the Sea Island Singers, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, bluesman Skip James, and the legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. There’s a full-throated electric guitar on “Didn’t It Rain” summoning guitar hero Sister Rosetta Tharpe; songs sourced from fingerstyle and Delta blues players Blind Willie McTell and Skip James, respectively; and a pervasive bass thump throughout extending from the Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout tradition of groove-keeping. Together with cleverly deployed fiddle and banjo, (please see his explainer on the banjo, and Black String Band history(!)), lots of hand claps, and call and response vocals, gospel choruses, and rapped verse from Demeanor, Blount seamlessly and instructively links up past, present, and potential future, in ways that will undoubtedly resonate. Jake Blount and his band play some of these tunes, in-studio. – Caryn Havlik

Set list: "Once There Was No Sun" "City Called Heaven" "Didn't It Rain"

Watch "Once There Was No Sun":

Watch "City Called Heaven":

Watch "Didn't It Rain":