Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project features Jayme Stone (banjo, voice), Moira Smiley (voice, accordion), Sumaia Jackson (fiddle, voice) and Joe Phillips (bass, voice). Focusing on songs collected by folklorist and field recording pioneer Alan Lomax, this “collaboratory” brings together some of North America’s most distinctive and creative roots musicians to revive, recycle, and reimagine traditional music. The repertoire includes Bahamian sea shanties, African-American a cappella singing from the Georgia Sea Islands, ancient Appalachian ballads, fiddle tunes, and work songs collected from both well-known musicians and everyday folk: sea captains, cowhands, fisherman, prisoners, and homemakers.
Two-time Juno-winning banjoist, composer and instigator Jayme Stone makes music inspired by sounds from around the world, bridging folk, jazz, and chamber music. His award-winning albums both defy and honor the banjo’s long role in the world’s music, turning historical connections into compelling music. The Other Side of the Air is a travelogue of imaginary landscapes and faraway lands. The album traverses the Cinnamon Route through Persia and India, revisits and reinvents melodies Stone collected in West Africa, and includes a Concerto for Banjo and Chamber Symphony. In concert, you’ll catch his quartet playing a Bach fugue, Trinidadian Calypso, Bulgarian mountain dance, and selections from his award-winning albums.
THE LOMAX LEGACY
“Alan Lomax was a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax is most famous for his work in the penitentiaries, plantations, and lonely farms of the Mississippi Delta, where he returned no less than seven times between 1933 and 1985 to listen, observe, fraternize, and record night after night, year after year; but he repeated this feat with astounding results in hundreds of obscure places in the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, and North Africa. Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and the Reverend Gary Davis were only a few of the many geniuses, famous and obscure, who were in reality telling us the true story of our country over Alan’s microphone. The sympathy, connoisseurship, and technical avant-gardism he poured into his work in every platform — from the interview to the printed page, concert stage, commercial disc, and scholarly article — yielded some of the most passionate and intimate documents of any era, which might have been lost but instead led to the ecumenical vision of the world’s music we have today. But more than this, what Alan Lomax had in mind was the renewal of the forgotten springs of human creativity.” — Anna Lomax Wood
