Review: Solo Guitarist Yasmin Williams at Caffe Lena, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025
Guitarist Yasmin Williams tossed off that humble, inclusive invitation casually at Caffe Lena Wednesday; then the innovative virtuoso played rare, wondrous sounds.
She traced her novel development from virtual to real guitarist in two sets of pristine playing; at once introspective and expansive, feelings expressed in beautiful sounds.
When she beat the online virtual Guitar Player 2 game at 12, her parents got her a real guitar. She found her victorious technique of tapping downward on the game controller across her knees also worked on a real instrument.
Dobro players hold their resonator guitars across their laps, as Williams does, but typically play with a slide; Williams used only her fingers Wednesday, but slid them at times to slur and glide notes.
She may have known how to play before deciding what to express. Then theory and composition training at NYU shaped technique into a questing, innovative vision: more Stanley Jordan (who played the Caffe recently), Michael Hedges and Adrian Legg, say, than John Fahey or Leo Kottke.
A screen above and behind Williams showed a narrow green river valley; later it held moving waters; and the natural world shaped the pastoral grace of her opener “Cliffwalk” from her new (third) album “Acadia.” At first, she held her Skytop acoustic in a conventional posture and picked cleanly, thumb pick hitting downward and fingers plucking upward. Lowering the guitar across her knees, she tapped the strings with both hands, right hand below the left that ranged over the neck, a kapo at the fourth or second frets. Meanwhile, she tapped the beat with metal tap shoes on a wide wooden board across her guitar case.
Those techniques served her well in “Juvenescence” with its jewel-like melody; in fact, at times, she had to explain emotional content counter to the sheer prettiness of steel-on-wood tones and graceful melodies.
“On A Friday Night” sounded stately and graceful, for example, as Williams lay the guitar flat across her lap – “lap-tapping,” she called this – and tapped the strings with a dulcimer hammer or smacked the body in a two-beat with her right hand as her left tapped the strings higher on the neck.
Afterward, she recalled how loneliness on arriving in the big city made her miserable. Later, she noted how becoming the first NYU freshman to win a campus talent contest brought friends and visibility, She followed “Friday” with “High Five” that celebrated those friends with spry, happy melodies.
“Through the Woods” again referenced the natural world, and introduced the kalimba, which she took up after watching an Earth Wind and Fire video. This busy, percussion-powered number featured hammer taps, left foot tapping the off-beat.
Playing kalimba – “You could call this a thumb piano…but you shouldn’t.”
Her first-set-closing mini-suite “Hummingbird” packed ironic content like “Friday.” She explained it portrayed time spent unhappily in Pittsburgh but started with a pretty finger-picked melody before hard-strummed explosions. Lowering the guitar from standard hold to across her knees, she launched an episodic deconstruction of the melody, a reprise charting the way back to it, then a speedy coda.
More irony in “Sisters,” a celebration of a mountainous Oregon stretch whose lack of turn-outs annoyed her while the view inspired the tune. Here she finger-picked circular riffs, then activated a recorded backing track, adding instruments like a sleek vehicle picking up hitchhiking harmonica, bass and strings. The melody mutated through insistent, minor key grumbles into a glorious chord-strum crescendo whose beautiful repeats formed the coda and brought a smile to Williams, awe in the near-capacity crowd.
“Virga” also relied on recorded backing tracks, the linked voices of Darlingside framing pretty guitar lines. The title refers to an ambiguous meteorological anomaly: rain falling through air so dry the drops evaporate before hitting the ground. The music felt mysterious, too; voices fading after her guitar went quiet.
For “Nectar,” she switched to a gleaming electric twin-neck she said she’d simply requested from Gibson and the company obliged. Masters Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) and John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Shakti) play this combined six- and 12-string instrument one neck at a time; Williams played both at once, leads on the 12-string neck with her left hand, right hand tapping bass lines on the six-string neck.
“Song for Alex” featured her familiar single-neck six-string acoustic, finger-picking a tender melody that grew wings as she turned to spry lap-tapping and ringing harmonics to close.
She added kalimba again for “Skippin’ (Song for Bri)” – tapping with fingers and feet – then closed with “Restless Heart,” right hand tapping the body of the guitar, left hand tapping the strings.
Although all instrumental, without vocals, the show wasn’t just for guitar nerds since Williams entertained with a humble affect and a wide warm smile like the great violinist Regina Carter, a virtuoso stylist half a generation older.
Showing Her Skytop Guitar – Twin sound-holes on the side
SET LIST
1 – 7:38-8:15 p.m.
Cliffwalk
Juvenescence
On a Friday Night
High Five
Through the Woods
Hummingbird
2 – 8:30–9:30 p.m.
Sisters
Virga
Nectar
Song for Alex
Skippin’ (Song for Bri)
Restless Heart
Playing kalimba right-handed, tapping on guitar strings with her left
Hoke's Jukebox 