Additional Information
American guitar prodigy and innovator Yasmin Williams performs at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal (FIJM) for the first time, on the Rogers stage, this Friday June 27. Michel Labrecque sat down with Yasmin Williams to discuss her vision of music and the political situation in her country.
Yasmin Williams plays guitar like few others. She sometimes puts her guitar horizontally on her thighs and strikes the strings percussively; she rubs a bow on her strings; she connects an African percussion instrument, the kalimba, to her guitar. She plays percussion with her feet. The young African-American from the Washington DC area has turned the world of guitar upside down by mixing genres and ways of playing.
“It all started with the Guitar Hero game,” she laughs. “My dad had bought it for my brothers, but I got hold of it and kept it in my room and ended up beating the game.”
Yasmin was twelve years old and had never played guitar. She begged her parents to get her one. Soon after, she owned an electric guitar and began playing it percussively. Today, Yasmin Williams is best known for her innovative fingerstyle acoustic guitar playing.
“One day, I heard Blackbird by the Beatles and it changed my life,” she recounts. She then put her electric six-string away in its case for a while. In the meantime, she studied music composition at New York University. Her range of knowledge expanded, and she began to dream of a career in music.
“I play folk guitar, but with a lot of other influences; you could call it ‘folk plus’,” she says.
In 2018, Unwind, her first instrumental guitar album, was released. “I was very much a purist, I rejected the idea of doubling up sound tracks, I wanted an album without artifice, strictly acoustic,” says Yasmin. This first offering introduces us to a guitarist in the tradition of the virtuoso guitarists of the 70s, such as Stephen Grossman, John Renbourn and Leo Kottke. But Yasmin also introduces us to her new facets of guitar playing, reinventing the way strings are touched.
“I don’t know anyone who plays percussively like I do, apart from a Quebec guitarist called Erik Mongrain, whom I discovered years later,” says Yasmin. Check it out, it’s true. Erik Mongrain played a few times with a horizontal guitar.
In 2021, Urban Driftwood arrived, an album on which she took the liberty of dubbing and accompanying musicians. I gave myself more freedom,“ she says, ”with a drummer, a cellist and the kora. Although instrumental, the album reflects a very troubled 2020 in her country, with the pandemic, the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, as Yasmin Williams points out on the cover.
“Yes, I’m politicized, in the times we live in it’s not really a choice. I try to design projects to promote certain causes. I don’t like what’s going on at the moment at all.
She is scheduled to perform next September at Washington’s Kennedy Arts Center, which Donald Trump recently took control of. “A lot of artists, boycott, I chose to give my concert, in solidarity with the people who work there; but I’m going to say things on stage, that won’t please everyone.”
In 2025, Yasmin becomes more ambitious with Acadia, an album where she multiplies collaborations and sounds. We hear multiple guitar sounds, both electric and acoustic. It’s an album where jazz influences shine through more than folk. “I worked really, really hard on this music, and it reflects more of my personality as a songwriter. Among other things, she plays a double-necked electric guitar, from which she draws innovative sounds.
At 7pm tonight on the Rogers Stage, we’ll be treated to a mix of these three albums. “It’ll be just me, my guitar and you, the audience, hoping for good weather. I never make a set list in advance, so we’ll see.
Yasmin’s main influences? “Jimi Hendrix, for sure, but above all Elizabeth Cotten, an African-American folk singer born at the end of the 19th century, very inventive in her own way.”
The virtuoso guitarist has also written music for documentaries, including one on piano. She also has a project for a progressive rock band. She’s also a fan of Gogo music, a funk style invented in the Washington area where she lives. And hip-hop.
We’ll probably be hearing about it for a long time to come. And not necessarily just with guitars.
Let’s hope for good weather tonight. That’s not necessarily guaranteed.
