Tag: brazil

Guitarist Yasmin Williams’ Techniques Are Second Only to Her Songs

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Guitarists spend lifetimes — often gleefully, sometimes manically, or at times frustratingly — finessing techniques, especially with their picking hand. Entire careers can be made or broken by the idiosyncrasies of one picker’s striking and sounding strings. Fingerstyle guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams has mastered myriad forms of right-hand styles, each complicated enough for multiple lifetimes’ worth of study. But she doesn’t merely alternate techniques between pieces; to a transcendentally perplexing degree she effortlessly alternates her entire picking hand approach mid-song.

On her 2021 release, Urban Driftwood, a collection of thoughtful, dynamic, and engaging instrumentals written for fingerstyle guitar and harp guitar, Williams makes many of these technique-swaps while the compositions charge forward, each one earning tailor-made right-hand approaches. As a result, the songs don’t feel encumbered when Williams, mid-melody, goes from right hand fingerstyle to bowing her strings with a cello bow, or plunking out notes on a kalimba taped to her guitar’s face, now positioned laying across her lap. She utilizes hand percussion and tap shoes to fill out arrangements, interposing Afro-descended instruments from around the world into her compositions, and she picks up, puts down, and readjusts her stable of musical tools in realtime — as a foley sound effect artist, prop master, or choreographer might. 

In guitar-centered communities — which are, it’s worth pointing out, largely white, straight, and male — where the overwrought, complicated, and mind-bending are regarded as the highest value currencies, you might expect the intricacies of Williams’ compositions, and the physicality of these impressive, visually striking techniques, to be the entire point of the music. But, as Williams explains in our interview and demonstrates indelibly in her Shout & Shine livestream performance — which will air on BGS on March 31 at 4pm PDT / 7pm EDT  (watch above) — the acrobatics of her playing are merely a means to an end. While entrancing, each fresh, inventive way Williams creates a dialogue with her instrument is merely a tool for her to execute each individual song, as close to how she hears it in her head as possible.

We began our conversation discussing this phenomenon and how it’s an active, deliberate choice on the part of Williams to serve her own songs.

BGS: There isn’t nearly as much variation in right hand or picking techniques in bluegrass and old-time as you use – tap, lap tapping, fingerstyle, harp guitar, I’ve even seen you bowing your guitar. So many of these contemporary guitar styles that you switch back and forth between are so different from each other, so what ties them all together for you? What does it feel like when you’re thinking about switching between these styles?

YW: I don’t really think about it much at all! Unless it’s logistically for a live performance, like, “Oh, I need to put my bow here, I need to put my kalimba here.” That [stage choreography] is really the only context in which I think about it. These different techniques, I just use them for whatever the song requires. They’re more like compositional tools. It’s more like I’m trying to find the sound that’s in my head or I’m trying to find a sound that’s different from [how] my guitar [already sounds], something to supplement whatever I’m writing. It’s not really like, “I want to make a lap tapping song!” It’s not conscious like that. These techniques are kind of my inventions and I only really come up with them to well, finish the song, basically. 

I’ve never really been technique-forward – yeah, guitar culture is very nerdy and I’ve never been very into that, at least in terms of the techniques, I don’t usually care what people are doing. [Laughs] I care more about the result. However you choose to get there is cool, too! But I don’t really scout other people’s techniques or anything. 

It makes me think of Elizabeth Cotten, who you have mentioned in past performances and interviews as an influence of yours. She was left-handed and played “upside down and backwards,” playing the guitar the way she needed to play it. 

[Laughs] Yes! She just figured it out, she was determined! Elizabeth Cotten and Jimi Hendrix kind of served the same purpose for me. They’re both extremely unique, I love that about them, and they really didn’t care about how they were “supposed” to do things, they weren’t bogged down by tradition. Elizabeth Cotten, I love her because, somewhat obviously, she’s a Black woman who plays guitar fingerstyle, which is very cool — and banjo, too. How she played, I can’t figure it out! It’s fun to figure out and to watch, but it’s even cooler to not watch her play and just listen. All of her tunes are so catchy. She’s great, I’d love to be as great of a songwriter as her one day, hopefully.

Some of the songs on Urban Driftwood feel so huge and expansive, but some feel so introspective and meditative, despite the fact that most tracks have very similar, stripped down, simple instrumentation and arrangements. It’s not a lot of production and arranging. How do you accomplish that dynamic range? What is your own dialogue with your instrument like during the creative process, during recording and writing?

That’s a really interesting question! But, I don’t know! [Laughs] Sorry to say that, but I really need to think more about this. 

Some songs, I definitely did want to be more introspective, like “I Wonder.” That was definitely one I wanted to be very intimate. And I did think about, in a live setting, how I wanted the song to feel more quiet and more intimate than other arrangements. “Swift Breeze” is another one I wanted to have an edgier sound. I don’t really think about it, I guess I’m just extremely tunnel-visioned. At the time of writing or recording a song I only think about what the song needs. Whatever that particular song that I’m working on in that moment needs. I didn’t think about live performance at all until after the album was already out and finished, which was probably not the best idea, [Laughs] I’m kind of regretting it now, but I’m working it out. 

I did think about the arrangement for “Urban Driftwood” a lot. I didn’t want to use tons of overdubs or multi-tracks on many of the songs [on the album], because I don’t really “believe” in it, I guess. That one, I wanted it to sound expansive, but also I wanted it to be able to work in a more intimate setting, too. But even so, I’m not really thinking about it that much.

The guitar, when you take it out of the context of the average player’s experience — which is usually playing with a pick and using three or four chords — when you remove it from that context so many new and exciting ideas have to start flowing, like when you pick up a bow instead of a pick. What is your experimentation like when you’re composing/writing?

I tend to repeat things I like over and over again. I can do that for hours. [Laughs] It’s a bit of a mess, it’s not the most efficient way to write something, but I can make up a melodic line that I really like and play it for hours and hours and hours. Other things will start to form while I’m playing that. Then I’ll record it, or write it down in notation, whatever I need to do to remember it. That process can go on for months before I even finish a song. 

I love experimenting. I love finding new, different things to use. Like a hammered dulcimer hammer or a bow or tap shoes, which are something else I use. Those were another example of problem solving. Now I’m into pedals a lot more so I’m experimenting with those, too. There are tons of great pedals out there, so it can be pretty difficult. It’s another world on its own! I’ve always been an experimental player, ever since I started playing. 

Who are you listening to now who inspires you? And who – you already mentioned Jimi Hendrix and Elizabeth Cotten – do you look to and who influences you from past generations? 

I kind of want to go back to where I’m from [in Northern Virginia], Chuck Brown is an influence — maybe not directly, I don’t really model my playing after his at all. He’s a guitar player from the D.C. area, he plays go-go music, a kind of regional style of music here. I’ve always loved him, from when I was a kid. 

Libba Cotten, obviously, is a huge influence. I wish I had known about her when I was younger. I think I could’ve saved a lot of time by not trying to be something I was never going to be. I really wanted to be a shredding, metal-type guitarist. I think that’s what I associated the guitar with–

Is that where the tapping came in? 

Yeah! 

That’s amazing. There are a lot of post-metal pickers in bluegrass! We have quite a few. 

[Laughs] I mean, I used to play Guitar Hero and that had so many rock songs and metal songs on it and tapping stuff. A bit of southern rock, too. But it was really rock- and male-centered and it would’ve been great to find Elizabeth Cotten sooner. That would’ve been great. I still like Paul Gilbert, I still like Buckethead, all of them, but it definitely would’ve been better if I had found Libba Cotten or Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Algia Mae Hinton sooner. 

Ah! I love Algia Mae, when you mentioned tap shoes earlier I immediately thought of her and the tradition of buck dancing and clogging connected to finger-picking. 

I know! I didn’t know anything about that until recently! I didn’t really know anything about that until the past couple of years, I’ve definitely gone down the rabbit hole of all of that now, though.

I guess I am listening to more guitar music these days than I ever have before. When I first started playing I didn’t really listen to any, because I didn’t really like it, the fingerstyle stuff and the technical stuff. Whatever you want to call it. But now, it’s great. There are a lot of contemporary players I really enjoy, I love Daniel Bachman’s stuff. [The band] The Americans have cool stuff. Chuck Johnson and Sarah Louise. There are a lot more people releasing music that isn’t just a derivative of what already exists in the guitar canon or in traditional guitar scenes. 

This topic has come up recently — in my interview with Jackie Venson and also with Sunny War — but more and more when I find myself engaging with contemporary guitar music, it’s made by women. To a degree, I think the music women are making in fingerstyle guitar and in “guitar culture” right now is just not what you hear like… in the halls at NAMM. As a queer person, I think I avoid guitar culture a lot because it feels so toxically masculine. Do you feel that, too?

Yeah, I feel that now that I’m in the scene more. When I released my first album — and before that, when I was just learning and coming up — I didn’t feel anything like that, because I think I just ignored it. I didn’t really care. (I still don’t really care.) [Laughs] There are nicer sections in the guitar world as well as more “competitive” or kind of douchey sections. [Laughs again] Like the guy who will turn my amp on, cause he thinks I can’t turn it on. That happens a lot. 

Looking ahead to the future, with vaccines rolling out and it feeling like we’re at this transition point from pre-COVID to the beginning of post-COVID — and you’re gaining so much momentum with this record even during the shutdown — what are you looking ahead to? And what does this transition from “before times” to “after times” feel like to you? 

I’m actually kind of thankful for it. It’s giving me time to reflect — not only on the album’s success, but it’s giving me time to not worry about shows. I can plan and build a team around me and become more “professional” [to be ready] when touring does start up and venues do start opening again. 

Creatively and musically I am all OVER the place! [Laughs] I’m writing a piece for a berimbau group called Projeto Arcomusical, the berimbau is an old, Afro-Brazilian instrument. I’m really excited for that, I can finally use my college degree and be a composer for once. I’m working with another group, based in NYC, called Contemporaneous, arranging songs from my new album for a summer concert, which is fun. I’m working on new music, trying to write more harp guitar stuff, playing my twelve-string guitar more. My head’s all over the place, really. 

I definitely feel a sort of rejuvenation now that I’ve gotten past the “WTF is going to happen?” Now I’m just like, “Whatever happens happens,” and I’ve gotta make new music!

Photo credit: Kim Atkins Photography

LISTEN: Chris Castino, “Duluth”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Chris Castino
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Duluth”
Album: Brazil
Release Date: March 13, 2020

In Their Words: “When you come out of a fog of drugs or bad love or any addiction, everything seems raw for a while. I guess the truth is raw sometimes. This song is that time where you beg God not to feel this way again, but this time something feels different. Like a new morning; blurry yet full of hope.” — Chris Castino

Photo credit: Storied Life Pictures

SMALL WORLD: Guitarist Lionel Loueke Brings Gentility to ‘The Journey’

Posted on by Editor

Lionel Loueke sat in a hotel room while on tour somewhere in Europe about a year and a half ago, watching the news on TV. The Benin-born guitarist, whose inventive playing has astonished many through his roles with Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and his own band, was horrified by what he was seeing.

“It was a ship,” he remembered of the coverage. “A boat that came from Libya, I think. Many people died in the sea. I remember seeing kids, pregnant women in a boat and in very ugly conditions tossing the Mediterranean.”

It was a boat carrying refugees from North Africa to Europe, people trying to escape war and famine, only to perish on route. He was overwhelmed with emotion. He responded in the way most natural to him.

He picked up his guitar.

“I wasn’t thinking of composing that day,” he says. “Just playing some simple triads. I recorded myself improvising, all triads, more of a classical style.”

As much as what he was watching tore him apart, made him angry and pained by the horror and violence of it, the music he was making didn’t sound angry, did not reflect the violence and brutality. Instead it was music of gentility.

“I’m personally a non-violent person,” he says. “I practice Buddhism, with Herbie now for a few years. That comes through my playing and my music. There are other ways to resolve problems than violence. I think we touch more people this way — maybe the gentle part will catch more people’s attention than something angry and aggressive. That’s the way I see it.”

And that is exactly the tone throughout his new album, The Journey, which includes “Vi Gnin” (“My Child” in the Mina language of a coastal district of Benin), the piece that grew from those triads he played in the hotel room.

It’s a tone that tied to a lot of things for him as he watched and played that day. He thought of other ships, ships that took people from his home region in an earlier era across the Atlantic to be slaves in Brazil. And he thought of the music of Brazil of more recent times, echoing the earlier eras, sounds that thread through the album.

The album, the 45-year-old musician’s seventh as a leader, doesn’t start with slaves being taken to South America, though. It starts with some returning to Africa. Opening track “Bouriyan” is a lilting samba, inspired by those who moved back to Benin, once a Portuguese colony, from Brazil as slave revolts racked the country during its fight for independence in the 19th century. It’s something to which he feels a very direct connection, as many of those returnees settled in the town of Ouidah, where his mother grew up. Loueke has indelibly fond memories of his mother cooking feijoada, the Brazilian-rooted beans-and-meat stew. But of course he had no idea of those roots.

“For me, I thought it was from Benin!” he says. “That’s the real connection.”

It was the same with the music that came from the Brazilian ties.

“I grew up listening to Brazilian music, without knowing it was Brazilian music,” he says.

That came later, when he left Benin as a young man to study jazz at the American School of Modern Music in Paris. “I started hearing the Brazilian guitarists,” he recalls. “First guy I heard was Baden Powell. Then of course João Gilberto, Gilberto Gil. All those classic Brazilian composers.” And, of course, Antonio Carlos Jobim, the essential Brazilian guitarist-composer of “The Girl From Ipanema,” “Desafinado” and so many others at the foundation of the canon.

“Jobim! Jobim might be the second one I heard. I was already playing some of those standards, classic songs we all knew.”

For many, that connection may be a bit of a revelation. The evolution of some music back and forth across the Atlantic is well-known — the way Afro-Cuban music sprung from Yoruban roots and then returned to be embraced and reworked in various African locales, most prominently. But the sounds associated with Brazil on which Loueke draws for The Journey are lesser associated with Africa.

“You have the return after slavery, that part is not well-known,” he says. “But pretty much in every country where you have the coasts, some of the slaves who came back on different coasts got together and used the culture back from where they had come from.”

That all provided the starting point for creation of the music here, under the guidance of producer and co-arranger Robert Sadin, starting with Loueke’s guitar and vocals, with words in Mina, Fon, Yoruba and his own “language” of clicks, hums and sighs. They then brought in a variable cast of complementary, enhancing support, a wide-ranging roster including Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, bassist Pino Palladino (the guy who, among many other things, stepped in to the Who when John Entwistle died), New York saxophonist John Ellis, Trinidadian trumpeter Étienne Charles, classical clarinetist Patrick Messina, versatile cellist Vincent Ségal and Benin-born percussionist Christi Joza Orisha, as well as Loueke’s long-time trio partners, bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth.

“We didn’t think about who was going to play at the beginning,” Loueke says. “I was doing three days myself for the project, then we decided based on that who would be the right person to bring something magical. Choice was to find musicians who can bring something different, refreshing.”

Refreshing is a good description of Loueke’s whole approach to music, but also dazzling in technique and originality, something he developed from his youth when he came under the sway of the music of Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Grant Green, then developed in his studies Paris, in Boston at the Berklee College of Music and in Los Angeles at the Thelonious Monk Institute — his audition at the latter being in front of a panel that included Hancock, Blanchard and Shorter.

All of that, all of him, is in this new album more than anything he’s done before, he says. It comes through strongly when he talks about the songs and their inspiration, what they mean to him.

“‘Kába,’ when something good or bad happens we look up or down,” he says of one. “Kába means ‘sky’ and it’s all about looking to the sky. We look for hope. We are thankful.”

Of another: “‘Gbé’ means ‘life,’ how life is beautiful at the beginning, but sometimes there are the roses and you have to be careful when you’re walking or step on the thorns.”

And another: “‘Molika’ is a song I wrote for my kids — Moesha, Lisa and Mika.”

He’s reluctant to call this a political album, despite the initial matters that spurred it. It goes much deeper than politics.

“It’s a very personal record for me,” he says. “I call it The Journey for that reason. It’s kind of a resume of all I’ve done from the beginning as a musician, and as a person, until today. And this is the right time to talk about these things. I’m not a political person. But to speak out, musically, to make a statement — well, after all for me we are living it, one way or another.”

Photo credit: Jean-Baptiste Millot

3X3: Zeshan B on Water, Withers, and Wondering about Twitter

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Artist: Zeshan B
Hometown: Chicago, IL
Latest Album: Vetted
Personal Nicknames: Z

If you had to live the life of a character in a song, which song would you choose? 

Definitely NOT Eleanor Rigby

Where would you most like to live or visit that you haven’t yet? 

Brazil. I think I’d make some friends down there. 

What was the last thing that made you really mad? 

Oh definitely the GOP. HANDS DOWN the GOP. I feel like that’s the only thing they’re good at — making me really mad.

Which Judd is your favorite — Naomi, Wynonna, Ashley, Apatow, or Hirsch? 

Mama Naomi. 

Whose career do you admire the most? 

Bill Withers — man did everything on his own terms. 

What are you reading right now? 

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

Extrovert with surprisingly introverted qualities.

Whiskey, water, or wine? 

Water. Although they say wine does have those antioxidants …

Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? 

Facebook, for sure. Instagram isn’t all that bad. But Twitter, though — why is it still a thing? I just don’t get it.