The Cedar Presents
JAKE BLOUNT TRIO with Joe Rainey
Saturday, March 29, 2025/ Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
All Ages
Seated
$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show
This is a seated show with general admission, first-come-first-served seating. The Cedar is happy to reserve seats for patrons who require special seating accommodations. To request access accommodations, please go to our Access page.
For Cedar presented shows, online ticket sales typically end one hour before the door time, and then, based on availability, tickets will be available at the door.
LISTEN
"Once There Was No Sun" by Jake Blount. Video courtesy of Jake Blount
ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Cedar is honored to present this very special Saturday show with JAKE BLOUNT and special guest, Joe Rainey.
Collaborators on the Smithsonian Folkways release, symbiont, synthesizing instruments, songs, teachings, and oratory from different traditions with modern literary, political, and compositional sensibilities (and even a dash of “hard” science).
Jake Blount
A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon. Jake Blount’s album, The New Faith, is a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways. The New Faith is spiritual music, filled with hope for salvation and righteous anger in equal measure. The album manifests our worst fears on the shores of an island in Maine, where Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change. Jake Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason - because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future.
In September 2024, Smithsonian Folkways released award winning artists Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin's collaborative album symbiont, sharing the lead single/video “My Way’s Cloudy (feat. Joe Rainey).” An album in two acts, symbiont is a dialogue with the ancient and anterior. The listener is met with rising tidewaters, massive droughts, and the appearance of an iconoclastic uprising amidst the world’s indifference. Questions of future or present tense swirl as the duo unspools the intertwined threads of racial and climate justice. The duo says, “Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperiling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky. The music of symbiont is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”
In defiance of genre, revisionist histories and linear time, Jake and Mali have made an Indigenous and Afrofuturist folklore that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny. The duo employed shape-note hymns, spirituals, Caribbean banjo tunes from the late 17th century, sequenced beats and synthesized drones, screaming electric guitars, and more to create the album. Their “genrequeer” approach to their respective traditions has earned them a place in some of the same archives from which they pulled repertoire for symbiont.
Folk musicians tend to use terms like “the folk process” or “oral tradition” to describe the way songs change, hybridize and diverge into new works as they pass from one practitioner to the next. But the word most widely used today is one that folk musicians with nostalgic, self-conscious aspirations to rurality have generally shied away from: remix. Jake and Mali embrace the term and concept with symbiont. They explain, “symbiont is a remix album. The works included here synthesize instruments, songs, teachings, and oratory from different traditions with modern literary, political, and compositional sensibilities (and even a dash of “hard” science). The interactions between these disciplines give rise to the musical, ideological, and spiritual synergisms that undergird symbiont—and also to points of intense conflict.”
Mali and Jake continue, “This record reflects not only the natural harmonies that exist between our individual and cultural perspectives, but also an arduous process of reconciliation through remix. symbiont is a precisely honed sound mythography born from the same process it champions: the cultivation of a shared future through care, respect, and sacrifice.” The process entailed stitching together multiple traditions from both of their cultures and giving certain significant plants a compositional role through modular synthesis.
To learn more about JAKE BLOUNT:
Joe Rainey
Joe Rainey is a Pow Wow singer. On his acclaimed Niineta, he demonstrates his command of the Pow Wow style, descending from Indigenous singing that’s been heard across the waters of what is now called Minnesota for centuries. Depending on the song or the pattern, his voice can celebrate or console, welcome or intimidate, wake you up with a start or lull your babies to sleep. Each note conveys a clear message, no matter the inflection: We’re still here. We were here before you were, and we never left.
Rainey grew up a Red Lake Ojibwe in Minneapolis, a city with one of the largest and proudest Native American populations in the country. The Red Lake Reservation sits five hours to the North, a sovereign state unto itself, but Rainey grew up down in what Northerners call “The Cities,” in his mom’s house on historic Milwaukee Avenue on Minneapolis’ South Side. He was raised less than a mile away from Franklin Avenue, the post-Reorganization Act urban nexus of local Native American life, a community centered in the Little Earth housing projects and the Minneapolis American Indian Center. The neighborhood still serves as a home for both the housed and the un-housed, and the don’t-even-wanna-be-housed Native. It is the birthplace of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the pioneering grassroots civil rights organization founded to combat the colonizing forces of police brutality. Rainey came of age in the heart of this community, but always felt like he was living in a liminal space—not that he was uncomfortable with that. “Growing up, knowing that you weren’t from the Rez, but you were repping them, was kind of weird,” he says. “But I liked that.”
Rainey became interested in Pow Wow singing as a child—at the age of five, he started recording Pow Wow singing groups with his GE tape recorder, and his mom enrolled him in a dancing and singing practice with the Little Earth Juniors soon thereafter. As a pre-teen he began hanging out around The Boyz (a legendary Minneapolis drum group) at a house some of them stayed at in the Little Earth projects. “They knew me as a Little Joey,” he remembers. “As in, ‘Hey I tried to get Little Joey to sit down and sing, but he’s too shy.” By the time he was a teenager, however, he had found enough courage to help start The Boyz Juniors, his first drum group, before going on to sing with Big Cedar, Wolf Spirit, Raining Thunder, and Iron Boy. Eventually, his voice grew strong enough to sing in Midnite Express, a new drum group featuring some of The Boyz themselves. They were professionals, city Indians travelling all over the north country, repping their reservations and their neighborhoods on every side of every conceivable border—competing for cash and cred, carousing, providing the beat to the grass dances, always striving to capture that “Pow Wow feeling” of togetherness. Rainey was always just as much of a fan as he was a participant—when he wasn’t at his own drum, he was recording other drums, then studying the tapes when he got home, admiring and cataloging the different singing styles, whether it was Northern Cree, Cozad or Eyabay. Now with an upgraded workhorse Sony tape recorder, he was a student of the game, a maven, a bootlegger extraordinaire.
To learn more about Joe Rainey: