Yasmin Williams is one of the most inventive guitar players of the last decade, an artist devoted to deploying seemingly every technique imaginable to coax new sounds and ideas out of her instrument. She hammers the strings and wallops the body and taps the frets; she strums and drums and plucks with such speed and agility that her performances feel like sleights of hands, as though she owes as much to Ricky Jay as she does to Leo Kottke. But it’s all in service of her tautly, gracefully composed songs, which she approaches with a storyteller’s eye for setting and specificity, just as a lyricist might.
Williams didn’t merely write her 2022 album during the tumultuous year of 2020, but wrote it those hard times. “I Wonder (Song for Michael)” was one of several inspired by the demonstrations she attended in Washington, DC. But instead of evoking the commotion and peril of facing off against the police, Williams was much more interested in the warm camaraderie she felt for her fellow demonstrators, all of whom were taking similar risks toward a common goal.
Warm camaraderie of a different sort defines her follow-up, . It’s a bright, imaginative expansion of Williams’ sound, gregarious where sounded ruminative and solitary. Almost all of these songs feature a different set of players: The folk duo of color in “Hummingbird” with banjo runs and fiddle reels, respectively; the Nashville cosmic-jazz musician adds soft synths to “Virga.
” plays the rhythm bones on.
