Williams gets diverse

One of the most enjoyable facets of Keller Williams’ recently released two-CD live set, Stage, is to hear the variety of cover songs that are mixed in with originals on the CD.

Keller Williams

The diversity is remarkable, with tunes that range from “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang to the Buffalo Springfield classic “For What It’s Worth” to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” to the Queen/David Bowie tune “Under Pressure” — all served up in Williams’ distinctive skewed folk style.

“I think it, to me, spells out attention deficit disorder maybe,” Williams responded when asked what the variety of covers says about his musical tastes. “I think that’s what my whole stage show is about. I’m kind of a poster child for ADD … In my normal stage shows there are a lot of different places that I can go musically as far as instruments and toys and things like that. That, mixed in with how all over the place the covers are, I should be sponsored by some ADD drug.”

The Stage set captures Williams working in two very different types of settings. The first disc, “Stage Left,” was taken almost entirely from a 2003 show at Cal Poly Theatre in San Luis Obispo, Calif., where Williams played to a sit-down crowd. The second disc, “Stage Right,” is culled from 2003 shows at a variety of venues where crowds generally stand, dance and help create a looser vibe.

The settings for Stage may be different, but both discs capture the one-man-band approach that has made Williams a unique kind of solo performer.

On stage, he augments the standard instruments of guitar and vocals with a variety of other instruments, including bass, keyboards and drums. Using a technique Williams calls live phrase sampling, he creates the illusion of having several musicians on stage by stepping on an effects button to record, for instance, a keyboard part. By pressing the button again, the keyboard part gets played back, and Williams can then layer on another part on a different instrument. Repeating this process creates a multi-instrument backing track over which Williams can play and sing live.

Williams, though, didn’t develop this type of performance style until he was well under way with his career.

A native of Fredericksburg, Va., Williams came onto the national scene in 1994, after several years of gigging around the Virginia area, with the CD Freek.

But it was after Williams moved to Colorado in 1995 that his career began to pick up steam. While there, he happened to check out a show by the String Cheese Incident, a then-fledgling group that has gone on to become one of the most popular acts on the jamband scene. Williams struck up a friendship with the String Cheese Incident and soon began to do shows with the group, garnering a following within the jamband circuit along the way.

Two more studio albums followed, Buzz in 1996 and Spun in 1998, before Williams signed with Sci-Fidelty Records, the label founded by the String Cheese Incident.

His first release on Sci-Fidelty was Breathe, a 1999 CD that found Williams collaborating with String Cheese Incident and backed by the band throughout the record.

Before making Breathe, Williams had begun to explore live phrase sampling, and Loop, a 2001 live CD, captures Williams as he was just beginning to master the rudiments of live phrase sampling.

“Loop was an exciting record for me at the time because I was exploring this new kind of a technique and it was the beginning stages of this technique,” Williams said. “Stage is kind of an elaboration, kind of using the same techniques, but with more toys. Stage is kind of where Loop has evolved.”

Williams followed Loop with three more studio efforts — Laugh in 2002, Dance (which is essentially a remix of album tracks from Laugh) in 2003 and Home, also in 2003.

In addition to showing Williams’ improved live phrase sampling abilities, Stage also provides a good example of his quirky folk sound and his offbeat sense of humor.

Though often called a folk artist, Williams easily skirts the confines of that genre. Unlike the strummy, melodic sound many associate with folk, Williams’ playing style is more jagged and percussive, and his melodies are more angular and jazzy. This sound, though, seems appropriate for the offbeat originals that Williams often sings. (“Novelty Song,” “Blazeabago” and “One Way Johnny” are good lyrical examples included on Stage.)

Of course, as an audio CD, one thing Stage can’t show is how Williams builds his multilayered live sound. But Williams has now solved that problem with the release of a new DVD, Sight, recorded last November during a two-night stand at Mr. Small’s Funhouse & Theatre near Pittsburgh.

“They have this professional camera crew that comes in and really knows what they’re doing, and a director from San Francisco that kind of set it all up,” Williams said.

“I’m really excited to see what comes of it,” he said.