This Week’s Shows are Good Medicine

Talk about the healing power of music. Ahhh . . . This melodically eloquent French-Algerian musician invented the DADGAD tuning that is the standard for modern fingerstyle guitarists. His “almost sacred” instrumental music is an intimate and orchestral hymn. Big emotion guaranteed!

We met Hekselman through Chuck Lamb’s monthly Jazz series at Caffe Lena. A transplant from Israel to NYC, Hekselman is a regular at the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, The Jazz Standard, Dizzy’s Club and Smalls. His 9 critically-acclaimed records have made it into ‘best of the year’ lists on NY Times, Downbeat Magazine, All About Jazz and many others. Tonight he’ll be accompanied by Joe Martin on bass and Joe Dyson on drums.

A specialist in the early folk music of Black Americans, and a skilled performer of spirituals, blues and string band folk, Blount is star instrumentalist, scholar & activist. His new album, The New Faith,was released on Smithsonian Folkways last month. It is a stunning undertaking. The songs tell an Afrofuturist story set in a world devastated by climate change. The Black climate refugees perform a religious service, invoking spirituals that are age-old even now, familiar in their content but extraordinary in their presentation. These songs, which have seen Black Americans through countless struggles, bind this future community to each other and to their shared past.