On July 10, musicians Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin ’18 performed in Collis Common Ground as a part of the Hopkins Center for the Arts’s Free Summer Concert series, according to the Hop’s website.
Obomsawin, a member of Odanak First Nation and an internationally acclaimed experimental musician, and Blount, an award-winning Afrofuturist folk singer, teamed up to preview music from their upcoming release, “symbiont.” The concert lasted around an hour and a half and drew around 118 attendees, according to Hop Digital Communications manager Annie Branch.
Originally set to take place on the Green, the event was moved indoors due to inclement weather, according to the Hop’s website. The concert was co-sponsored by Dartmouth’s Music Department and The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation, a prominent philanthropic organization in the Upper Valley.
While both performers have roots in folk music, they “branched out” into very different genres with their recent work, according to Obomsawin. Their collaborative effort “defies categorization, disintegrating boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium and ancestor and progeny,” according to the Hop’s website. Nonetheless, Obomsawin said she and Blount still keep folk traditions “at the core of themselves as musicians.”
“We also believe that segregationist music categories do not reflect how we see music or the world, so we are trying to bring folk music closer to everything else and everything else closer to folk music,” Obomsawin said.
Throughout their set, Blount and Obomsawin took turns explaining the history and inspiration behind their songs. The duo included many “snippets of reconstituted music” in their performance, including a banjo sample from a 1687 manuscript — “the earliest written mention of a banjo that we have,” Blount said.
“[The melody] comes from the manuscript of a man named Hans Sloane, who was the physician to the British governor of Jamaica,” Blount said. “With the assistance of a free Black musician named Mr. Baptise, he managed to transcribe five banjo tunes he heard being played by enslaved Africans there in Jamaica, and that’s where these melodies come from.”
Blount and Obomsawin also interspersed clips of spoken word poetry and voice recordings from civil rights activists such as Fred Hampton over their music. Claire O’Flynn ’26 said she “found it really interesting that they were able to bring back sounds and songs from early indigenous peoples and civil rights activists and give them a new platform in modern music.”
“The way that [Blount] played the fiddle in an intentionally screechy and haunted way in ‘We’re Stolen and Sold from Africa’ felt like a protest of traditional expectations of music and definitions of beautiful music — which I found to be thematically connected to the pain and protest of the lyrics,” she added.
The concert drew a variety of attendees, including students, alumni and other community members. A cohort of students attended the performance as a class requirement for MUS 03.03, “American Music: Roots and Revolutionaries,” class participant Evan Jaffe ’26 wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth. According to Jaffe, Blount and Obomsawin spoke and played for his class the day prior to the concert, but the concert itself “did not meet [his] expectations.”
“While their recorded audio clips were interesting and their bass and guitar playing impressive, I do not think they performed to their strengths,” Jaffe wrote. “[Blount] is a wonderful banjo player and fiddler, yet he barely put down his guitar, and [Obomsawin] has a beautiful, rather expressive voice, but their excessive use of techno beats made their lyrics indistinguishable.”
Despite his dissatisfaction with elements of the concert, Jaffe wrote that he “greatly respect[s] their record project.”
“They have impressive knowledge of various musical genres and great playing ability, and I have never experienced a musician’s ability to blend those different genres together so well,” he wrote. “They play a great homage to folk music as well as the many musical traditions of African American and Native American communities.”
Hop intern Deha Kilickaya ’26 said it was “nice” to see more students in attendance, adding that the class requirement “definitely added some youth to a generally older audience.”
Hop Communications director Asmaa Abdallah wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that the July 10 concert was “a thrilling opportunity” for the Hop.
“[Blount] is a gifted musician and scholar,” she wrote. “His music brilliantly highlights and revives Black and Indigenous folk tunes. And [Obomsawin], who is a Dartmouth and Coast Jazz Orchestra alum, is a long-time collaborator with the Hop and has graced us [on] our stages alongside multiple artists.”
Obomsawin received a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature and government from Dartmouth in 2018. She has been celebrated for her groundbreaking debut album “Sweet Tooth,” which received best of the year in GRAMMY.com, JazzTimes, NPR and more. Obomsawin also produced the film score for the highly anticipated National Geographic documentary “Sugarcane,” directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie.
Blount takes a “genrequeer” approach to making music that challenges distinctions between “acoustic and electric, artist and medium and past and future generations,” according to his personal website. In November, Blount was invited to be a part of the Kronos Quartet on their sold-out 50th Anniversary performance at Carnegie Hall. His 2020 album “Spider Tales” was named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker and earned a perfect five-star review from The Guardian. Blount is also a dedicated music educator, having shared his work regarding the history of Black folk music at Yale University, Berklee College of Music and the Smithsonian Institution, according to his website.
The final event of the Hop’s Free Summer Concert series will feature a performance by the Pedro Giraudo Tango Quartet. The concert is scheduled for June 25 at 5:30 p.m. on the Green, according to the Hop’s website.
