If you really want to win a big bet, take someone blindfolded to a Keller Williams live performance. Then ask your sightless friend to guess how many people are onstage. You'll win every time.
Williams has a reputation as a one-man band whose technical wizardry can create complex layers of music, making it sound as if he's surrounded by a full group. Influenced in his early days by avant-artists such as Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges and Victor Wooten (of Béla Fleck's Flecktones), Williams began incorporating looping into his performances via custom guitars and Gibson's Echoplex effects hardware. With home-spun storytelling informed by everything from jazz, rock, bluegrass, electronica and jam-band theory, Williams' music can veer off onto many paths, and somehow seamlessly merge back together where it started. On the road almost constantly for a decade — with the likes of String Cheese Incident, Bob Weir's Ratdog and Yonder Mountain String Band, among others — he's also averaged an album a year since his first, Freek, in 1994.
None of Williams' recordings are alike, and he's amassed a fun, funky and refreshingly ambitious catalog with creative companions including Martin Sexton, Charlie Hunter, John Scofield and the husband-and-wife duo The Keels, with whom he recorded the bluegrassy Grass in 2005. His most recent release is 12, which takes a look back at his career (featuring one track from each of his previous albums) and the wild ride on which it's taken him.
Provenance: Fredericksburg, Virginia
Latest release: 12 (2007)
© 2007 Nigel Music Media LLC. Used by permission.
Keller Williams
