Jessye DeSilva will no longer apologize for being herself. Her latest, crowdfunded album, Renovations, chronicles an ongoing journey to self-love and acceptance: examining identity and trauma, reckoning with privilege and marginalization, reconciling self-image with others’ images of you, finding power in vulnerability, and learning to give yourself grace, advocate for yourself, and ignore the haters.
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 releases, symbiont (2024) and The New Faith (2022) - 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.
Bird & Augur is a Rhode Island–based anticapitalist folk duo inspired by the traditions of solidarity and resistance that shape labor songs, protest anthems, and global folk music. With rich harmonies, intricate fingerpicking, and heartfelt storytelling, Bo Fage (they/them, guitar) and James Cappelletti (he/him, banjo) lend their voices to an ongoing reckoning with systems of violence and control. Their music invites listeners to build community, and to attend to the signs, the stories, and the unfolding future that still responds to care and intention.
