“[Lionel Loueke]’s got the best rhythm and the best groove of any guitar player that I know. He’s magical. He’s a wizard, really.”
In line with many resourceful jazz practitioners, Gilad Hekselman responded to the enforced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic with a turning-lemons-to-lemonade attitude that ultimately eventuated in his new release, Far Star (Edition). It’s an eight-song date, on which Hekselman self-accompanies his guitar with keyboards, bass, whistle, tambourine, body percussion and voice, fleshing out the tracks with contributions from drummers Eric Harland, Ziv Ravitz, Alon Benjamini, and Amir Bresler; keyboardists Shai Maestro and Nomok; violist/violinist Nathan Schram; and bassist Oren Hardy. Throughout the proceedings, the 38-year-old guitarist displays the harmonic sophistication, timbral expansiveness, playful time feel, innate melodicism, and resonant tone that have placed him in the spotlight since he moved from Israel to New York City in 2004.
When COVID struck, Hekselman was in Israel with his wife and toddler son, after a vacation in Southeast Asia. “We got there at the beginning of February, and wound up staying for a year,” he said on a Zoom call from his Brooklyn apartment, two weeks after the birth of his second child. He pointed over his shoulder to one in a row of guitars hanging on the wall of his studio. “I brought that little guy, which you can throw on your back,” he said. “I only allowed myself to play for the family or when I was composing or transcribing, which for me are extensions of one another. I started writing tunes, and by the end of the trip I had something like 23.
“Like the rest of us, I didn’t know how long [the pandemic] would last, so I decided to record the songs as demos, so that,.
