By Cindy Mindell

HARTFORD – Basya Schechter, best known as founder and leader of Pharaoh’s Daughter, a seven-piece “neo-Chasidic” world-music ensemble, is headed for Hartford.

Schechter is currently full-time music director at Romemu, an egalitarian Jewish renewal community in Manhattan. She will bring her latest work, Songs of Wonder (The Heschel Project) to Trinity College on Wednesday, March 25.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Schechter is in the process of completing her degree at the ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal Cantorial Program, as well as performing and recording.

The self-taught singer-songwriter-guitarist began crafting her unique style by singing harmony at her family’s Shabbat table. As a college student and young adult, she traveled the world to learn musical styles and sounds, and participated in the Mendocino Middle Eastern Music and Dance Camp for several summers.

Setting to music the Yiddish poetry of the revered civil-rights activist and Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), Schechter has created a rich collection of Yiddish songs, with colorful arrangements featuring many acclaimed artists of Manhattan’s downtown Jewish music scene.

In his 2011 review of Songs of Wonder for The Jewish Daily Forward, Alexander Gelfand wrote, “…the marketing blurbs hardly do Schechter justice. Songs of Wonder … is not some naive Jewish/world-music mash-up, but a coherent statement from an artist who has figured out how to use all the tools at her disposal to sculpt a distinctive sound.”

Like many who know of Heschel as an American rabbi and scholar, Schechter was surprised to learn that the Warsaw native had also been a revered Yiddish poet. She was made aware of Heschel’s literary side by Meryl Zegarik, a fellow congregant at B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, who mentioned The Ineffable Name of God: Man, a book of Heschel’s poetry in the original Yiddish with English translations by Morton Leifman.

“Meryl said that she imagined the poems ‘composed,’ so I spent a good eight months reading them at night until I felt I could work with them,” Schechter recalls. “It was a slow process from poem to composition. I also spent a lot of time with Heschel’s other books during that time, since I hadn’t known that much about him before the poetry. Most people know him first through his teachings, philosophy, and other books, and then find out about the poetry. I had the opposite trajectory.”

While composing the songs, Schechter was faithful to Heschel’s original Yiddish lines, sometimes crafting one line into a chorus.

“Even though I’m known for Middle Eastern and Sephardic genres, I was mostly a guitar-based singer-songwriter coming out of college – so it was nice to connect that singer-songwriter part of me musically with the Yiddish,” she says. “I grew up in Borough Park, so we translated Bible into Yiddish, sang songs in Yiddish, and Yiddish was everywhere in my community. Invariably, some Middle Eastern influences got into the project, and I love the genre-mixing of oud [Middle Eastern lute] and Eastern sensibilities with oud.”

“The translation is not in the ‘music,’ but because I had the experience, when reading the poems, of the words starting to ‘dance’ before [I started] composing, I hired a videographer who will be at the show, who did a beautiful job of projecting the English translations of the poems ‘dancing’ on the screen while we are performing,” she adds.

From her perch as a Jewish musician and a composer of original Jewish music, Schechter has a unique view. “I think a lot of creative folks are reconciling their Jewish culturalness with their own musical passions,” she says. “So we have a melting pot of Jewish genres, which is as it should be.”

Basya Schechter will perform “Songs of Wonder (The Heschel Project)” on Wednesday, March 25, 7:30 p.m. at Trinity College, Mather Hall Terrace Rooms, 300 Summit St., Hartford. Admission is free and open to the community. For information: (860) 297-4195 / Lisa.Kassow@trincoll.edu.