Zakir Hussain brings his Masters of Percussion to town on Sunday.

Guitar fireworks are only part of a spring-kicking weekend that stretches north and south of Boston. The biggest guitar blowout goes down just over the New Hampshire border on Friday at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom with Experience Hendrix, a tour with Jimi’s bassist Billy Cox and an all-star lineup of axe-slingers in Buddy Guy, Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, Johnny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Zakk Wylde (a Hendrix tribute also may cap next Thursday’s Ultimate Guitar Experience show with Uli Jon Roth, Jennifer Batten and Andy Timmons just to the west at Londonderry’s Tupelo Music Hall).————————————————

Back in town, guitarist Jose Gonzalez and yMUSIC merge chamber textures at the Berklee Performance Center on Friday, while New Orleans’ Galactic lays down thick, heady grooves at House of Blues and Tuareg guitar hero Bombino unleashes his desert rock at the Sinclair. Boston’s keyboard and percussion-colored Alloy Orchestra presents live scoring to “Man with a Movie Camera” and “L’inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman)” — singularly or as a double feature — at the Somerville Theatre. And a bit north at Beverly’s refurbished Cabot Theatre, Kansas (still with original drummer Phil Ehart and guitarist Rich Williams) carries on with wayward resolve behind an upcoming new album on Friday, while British blues legend John Mayall, now 82, brings his band to the Cabot on Saturday (before he heads south to the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River on Sunday).

Back to guitar thrills, the virtuoso Joe Satriani lets his six-string ring at the Orpheum on Saturday, boosted by impressive drummer Marco Minnemann. Or for an alternate vibe, the David Wax Museum brings a rounded indie-rock flair to its Mexican folk rhythms on a double bill with string-laced local upstarts Darlingside at the Sinclair the same night (look for jewelry made out of DWM violinist Suz Slezak’s old donkey jawbone teeth at the merch table). Finally, Sunday offers a pair of extreme differences in California post-hardcore slammers Slaves at the Brighton Music Hall and Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain & Masters of Percussion at the Sanders Theatre.