Aisha Burns and more celebrate black voices in folk music at Club Passim on Sunday, 4 February 2024.

A bill taller than a baby’s arm with Stephanie Mckay, Pink Navel, Almira Ara, Melo Green, and Haasan Barclay.

Cliff Notez plays emcee, historian, and bandleader all night long.

The fest, born out of the Folk Collective initiative, takes its first steps at the start of Black History Month. A second step follows shortly, with Part Two scheduled for the following Sunday.

The pay-what-you-can affair drew a full house. For precisely what kind of show, it wasn’t entirely clear to either audience or artist as Cliff Notez kept the night going with a little planning, a little improv, and a lot of love. The proceedings felt very much like a family affair among artists who gave each other the green light to experiment and get loose. Hence the “family portrait”-style singalongs that brought the entire bill on stage at the start and finish of the evening.

Who knows what ‘folk’ is in the year 2024? The present of music is always a mystery that’s reconstructed after the fact. Which is another way of saying that the music is what you make it.

The grounding premise of We Black Folk Fest is that the popular image of folk music we’ve inherited in the present is an image marked by black erasure from the history of the genre.

In between sets Cliff Notez trotted out historical reference points. In particular, he was drawn to a particular instrument, the banjo, as a central symbol of what’s been lost.

The prototype of our present day banjo traveled across the Atlantic on slave ships, along with the musicians who played it, the singers who sang along with it, the entire community of culture & arts & everyday living that revolved around it.

The festival would have to wait until next week to hear the pluck of an actual banjo (courtesy Grace Givertz) but there were plenty of guitars in play. From the southern country twang of Aisha Burns’ six-string, the soulful strut of Stephanie Mckay’s, the tremulous indie folk of Pink Navel, the revved-up electric of Haasan Barclay, the rhythmic picking of Almira Ara, to the latter day funk whammy of Melo Green.

It was a night for guitars. And of all nights, it was the same night that Tracy Chapman, a local legend in Club Passim parts, came out of hibernation to wow the crowd at the Grammys with a guitar-led performance of “Fast Car.” It must be kismet.

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