Introducing... Yasmin Williams

Acoustic guitarist Yasmin Williams is an original, a genuine trailblazer, one of those rare musicians who challenges your preconceptions about the possible. The 27-year-old’s intoxicating playing throngs with cascading arpeggios and chiming harmonics, augmented by nifty extended techniques and entrancing polyrhythms, precipitating refreshingly innovative twists and turns with a self-taught approach born of a childhood video-game compulsion.

“It all came from playing Guitar Hero II,” says Williams with a smile, as she describes the evolution of her signature lap-tapping style. “To beat some of the songs on the game’s expert levels I had to place the controller across my lap and rapidly tap on the buttons, they were so fast.”

As an adolescent metalhead hooked on the virtuosic brutality of tech-death extremists Necrophagist and Obscura, it was perhaps inevitable that Williams would initially gravitate towards the electric guitar. But notions of shredding supremacy were quickly eclipsed by an ever-growing need for self-expression and originality. The discovery of players such as Kaki King and Erik Mongrain made the possibilities of the acoustic guitar seem boundless. 

“Before, I’d always thought acoustic guitars were just for sad singer-songwriters,” Williams explains. “But the acoustic allows me to do so much, revealing a new world of techniques and musical ideas. The guitar was no longer an instrument I used to emulate others, but one which allowed me to be myself and develop my own singular style.”

That ‘singular style’ permeates Urban Driftwood, Williams’ second and most recent album, issued via radical feminist record label SPINSTER in 2021. Remarkable for its deft amalgams of disparate influences and dizzying displays of invention, it successfully extends the idiosyncratic legacy of Guitar Soli (an acoustic guitar movement), while singlehandedly reinventing it with a batch of bold unorthodox moves. 

Across ten spellbinding tracks, Williams references guitarists from Elizabeth Cotten and Jimi Hendrix (two of her major inspirations) to William Tyler (a regular collaborator), while the album’s more singular magic is located in its curious extra timbres; the percussive slaps administered to the guitar’s body, the tentative ring of her axe-mounted kalimba on ‘Through the Woods’ and a self-accompanying tap-shoe shuffle during the broody hammer-on hopscotch of ‘Dragonfly’. She also showcases a deep reverence for the West African griot tradition, most noticeably on the album’s title-track, as her butterfly-winged kora notes respond to the beat of Amadou Kouyate’s djembé.

“I love West African polyrhythms, but I’m also totally influenced by the role West African music plays in people’s daily lives, in their dance and healing rituals, their religious ceremonies and weddings,” Williams says. “The griots tell the oral history of West African culture, and have been doing so for centuries.”

Williams sees this storytelling function as pivotal to her own work. The versatility of her instrument and ever-developing compositional chops enable her to be lyrical without the need for lyrics as she captures the zeitgeist of her environment, engaging with societal dysfunction, the recent global pandemic, political unrest, civil rights issues and the wider natural world, as well as her own position as a Black female guitarist operating within a discipline inundated by white males.

“Being a Black woman in a genre dominated by white men is vital to what I do,” Williams explains. “It means I can offer something new to the canon. To get the most out of anything, especially anything music-related, there has to be a variety of experiences, voices and perspectives to listen to and learn from, I feel honoured I’ve [got] the opportunity to stretch the narrative of solo acoustic guitar in a positive, and hopefully inspiring, direction.”

This interview originally appeared in the August/September 2023 (#190) issue of Songlines magazine.

Want to DISCOVER the WORLD through MUSIC?

Subscribe to our FREE weekly newsletter here

Subscribe to the magazine here

Yasmin Williams will perform at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, US (March 21-24, 2024)