Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton and Dennis Lichtman bring African-American folk and blues to Spencertown Academy. Paxton and Lichtman’s mutual love of the history, stories, and significance behind the music they play is apparent as they romp through an energetic and engaging set of acoustic blues, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley pop songs, 1920s jazz, twin fiddle hoe-downs, and original songs and compositions.

Tickets: Academy members: $25, General Admission: $30

Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton and Dennis Lichtman are both world-renowned multi-instrumentalists and vocalists whose musical friendship has grown organically in New York City for more than a decade. Their formal partnership began with a video shoot, Just Cross the River From Queens, at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in 2017. Paxton and Lichtman recently released their first full-length recording, simply titled Jerron Paxton & Dennis Lichtman.

Jerron Paxton plays black folk music from nearly all the idioms that entails. From the Jazz of stride piano and banjo from New Orleans to New York to the deepest of the blues played on guitar and harmonica of which he has been a noted figure since his teenage years, from the rural music that reaches the beginnings of black arrival in America played on fiddle, banjo, and bones to ragtime and other turn of the century music that gives the full breadth of black music before World War Two in a package that doesn’t lecture, but invites you to enjoy that music as it was given to him. Mr. Paxton has been known to give his audiences a sense of being transported not to a time, but a state of mind and understanding that allows audiences to enjoy black folk music and have it become a part of them as has been the American experience from the beginning.

Dennis Lichtman is a world-traveling bandleader who is best known for leading the famed trad-jazz jam sessions at Mona’s Bar in New York City since 2007, and which was described in the Wall Street Journal as “ground zero for an emerging late-night scene of young traditional jazz and swing players.” He is a masterful multi-instrumentalist (clarinet, mandolin, violin, and more) who has toured and recorded with The Lovestruck Balladeers, Pokey LaFarge, Ghost Train Orchestra, Jim Kweskin, and his own projects: The Brain Cloud, Mona’s Hot Four, and has a forthcoming original music album titled Secret Workshop.