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Seeing Yasmin Williams live can make concert goers wonder how all of those sounds come from one person.
After all, Williams not only plays guitar, an instrument she picked up after beating the video game “Guitar Hero 2.” She also uses tap shoes as percussion to help keep time, both arms and both legs playing at once, according to City Winery, where Williams will show off her performance techniques on Sunday, Nov. 14.
“Even with all limbs in play, it’s mind boggling that the melodic and percussive sounds that emerge are made by just one musician, playing in real time,” the venue said. “With her ambidextrous and pedidextrous, multi-instrumental techniques of her own making and influences ranging from video games to West African griots subverting the predominantly white male canon of fingerstyle guitar, Yasmin Williams is truly a guitarist for the new century.”
Williams’s second album, “Urban Driftwood,” was released back in January, and in it, the guitarist shows off her skills as a composer, and also includes West African instruments like the kora and the djembe, according to Pitchfork.
“The most dazzling moments are often the most intricate,” the publication said in an album review. “In ‘Swift Breeze,’ Williams uses everything at her fingertips like a percussion instrument, from the harmonics high along the fretboard to her persistent knocking against the wood of the body. In quieter songs like ‘Through the Woods’ and ‘Dragonfly,’ she finds melodies in repeated, hammered-on notes like cycles of birdsong.”
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