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Keller Williams
Before embarking on dream, Keller Williams' newest, most rewarding recording project, he scratched out a wish list of artists he'd like to collaborate with in the studio. Because
Williams, a restless troubadour, has been a fan of and tour mate with so many excellent musicians, his list of names-including lots of musicians he admires most-ran long and ambitious. “It was a totally unrealistic vision,” he says. “The idea was that
all we could do was ask, and the worst they could do was say 'No.'” The amazing thing is, the musicians he asked didn't say “No.” And that's how Keller's dream came true. Partial to oneword titles, Williams coined the album because it best described the experience.
“That's what this record was,” he says. “It was incredibly rewarding.”
Of course, when your dream team consists of outsized talents like Bob Weir, Béla Fleck, John Scofield, Charlie Hunter, Victor Wooten, The String Cheese Incident, Steve Kimock,
and more, well, you're going to encounter an obstacle or two. Scheduling snags held up completion of the album for nearly three years. It took Weir a year to find a date for Keller, but when he did, and he invited Keller into his home studio to do “Cadillac,” Keller found himself living, well, another dream. Likewise for his
work with Béla Fleck. Keller and Béla began their collaboration, “People Watchin',” in the summer of 2004 but it wasn't finished until two years later. In fact, since this project began, Keller released the double live, Stage (2004), the DVD, Sight (2005), and
most recently a bluegrass record, Grass (featuring Larry and Jenny Keel), not to mention hundreds of gigs.
But Keller never gave up on his dream. Armed with gentle persistence and plenty of patience, he slowly but surely started to
realize his vision, accumulating a star-studded array of recording partners as the magnitude of the project became increasingly
clear. “To be honest, I wasn't really thinking about public opinion for this record,” Keller admits. “It was all for me. Mostly I just wanted to be able to crank these songs up in my
pimped-out golf-cart when I'm 80. Some of these artists are living legends and will be appreciated long after we're gone. I'm extremely proud right now, but I'll be even more ecstatic
when I'm older and can look back on this record and wonder, 'How the hell did that happen?'”
dream is miraculous in more than just a logistical sense. To begin with, the material, 16 tracks in all, is unblemished; a cataract of electrifying musical alliances. With Williams' rapturous innovations
and his earthy, barefoot-in-the-park presentation as an anchor, songs like “Celebrate Your Youth” (with his pals in Modereko) and the riveting “Ninja of Love” (with Michael Franti)
emerge in an endless fount of mesmerizing entertainment.
Because a handful of his collaborators were six-stringers, many of these tracks find Keller moving his own guitar responsibilities into the shadows, sometimes even picking up the bass instead,
which, incidentally he plays surprisingly well. “When you bring in guitar players like Kimock, Hunter, Scofield, and Fareed Haque,” he says, “it doesn't make sense to compete with them.
I've always had this dream that I would be the bass player in a power trio with Steve Kimock.” On the magical instrumental “Twinkle” he fulfills that dream as well. “The power trio vision
was a short-lived one, but it became a reality.”
On “Kiwi and the Apricot,” Williams' acoustic rhythms provide a bed for Charlie Hunter's ample eight-string punctuations. “Charlie came in, heard the song and said, 'OK, this is how
we're gonna do it,' which is exactly what I wanted.
Which is another one of dream's miraculous qualities: Assembling such luminous talent is one thing. Feeding them challenging material is another. Williams refers to his customary
writing MO as simple. “Normally, my stuff is like verse/verse/bridge/chorus, verse/bridge/chorus. But in order to be interesting to a world class player like Victor Wootena guy who plays 50 to 60 songs by Béla Fleck, complex compositions
all infused with classical training-I needed to come up with something a little bit more, uh, difficult.”
For starters, Keller didn't send any charts or advance tips to his collaborators, choosing instead to let them come up with stuff on their own. Some songs were written specifically for his partners, some were songs that have resided in Williams' repertoire for years, finally getting a shot at an ultimate rendition.
Keller wrote tunes expressly for Weir and Franti, for example, but he let Scofield take a whack of his own at “Got No Feathers,” which also features Wooten on bass and Jeff Sipe on drums. “John does so many things, I really didn't know what I was going to get,” Keller says. “But he settled right in and like all great musicians he made it his own pretty much instantly.”
Many of the songs on dream have been shaped and reshaped countless times through Williams' own acclaimed performances. Known, of course, for his astonishing oneman
show, he surrounds himself with instruments and pedals and slides from one to the next. While the tunes are rooted in Williams' warm voice and spirited acoustic guitar,
he gives them depth and breadth via looping and delay. Soon he was accompanying himself, looping several instruments, and filling up an entire room with lush layers of sound … just one man and a humongous imagination.
Keller's been refining this kind of performance art for almost 15 years, logging over 100 gigs annually, and he's a productive recording artist as well. dream is Williams' ninth studio
release so far. He began recording in earnest back in 1993, after serving time in cover bands in high school and college. He got his first big break in 1997 when The String Cheese
Incident gave Keller, a Fredericksburg, Virginia native, an opening slot on their tour, after he volunteered to do it for free. From that point, Williams began to grow an audience
of his own, gradually winning fans through non-stop grassroots touring, beguiling performances, and talented and entertaining recordings. His calling card? A creative combination
of talent and technology. dream serves as a culmination of that approach.
“I can only hope that the people who've followed my career this far, the audiences and the taping community, are as thrilled about this project as I am,” he says. “From my perspective as a
fan, to be able to work amid such greatness was very humbling and it made dream an amazingly human experience.”
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WWW.KELLERWILLIAMS.NET
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 YONDER MOUNTAIN STRING BAND
BIO
Mountain Tracks: Volume 5
April 15, 2008
Colarado’s YONDER MOUNTAIN STRING BAND, known for its high-energy, improvisational live shows has just released (April 15, 2008) a new live album on the band’s own Frog Pad Records. This marks the 5th volume in their lauded series of live albums, Mountain Tracks. Blending bluegrass and rock with traditional instrumentation (guitar, bass, mandolin and banjo), YONDER has pioneered a sound that is their own over the past ten years as a band.
Mountain Tracks: Volume 5, a double-disc CD featuring the unreleased and in-demand live show from Columbus, OH at the Lifestyle Communities Pavilion (July 21, 2007) truly captures this sound. It also features a compilation disc of the best live tunes handpicked by the band from the past couple of years. As bassist Ben Kaufmann notes, “it’s a ‘through-the-years set of music” with the material ranging from 2004 through 2007. The compilation album has been sequenced so that it recreates the flow of an actual live show. It connects all the key elements of a live Yonder show: the fans, the music, the band and the energy.
Yonder (Adam Aijala-guitar, Jeff Austin-mandolin, Dave Johnston-banjo and Ben Kaufmann-bass) first came together in September 1998 over a growing love for bluegrass that quite unexpectedly brought the four players together during a free-for-all jam session at The Verve, a bar outside of Boulder, in 1998. Once they met, they knew they were onto something. “It was an eye-opening experience because we heard a unique sound,” says Johnston. “Something coalesced that night.”
Emphasizing song craft and unafraid to push its boundaries, things began snowballing quickly. In 1999, the band debuted with Elevation, produced by Grammy-winning dobro player Sally Van Meter and released (like each of its ensuing studio discs) on their own Frog Pad Records. Yonder Mountain returned in 2001 with Town by Town, helmed by Grammy Award winning songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Tim O’Brien. Van Meter was back behind the boards for the 2003 set Old Hands, a concept album of sorts that featured the songwriting of Benny “Burle” Galloway. Featured on the evocative tunes about cowboys, miners and all sorts of hard-livin’ Western folk were O’Brien, lauded fiddleman Darol Anger (Bela Fleck, David Grisman Quintet, Vassar Clements) and dobro player Jerry Douglas (Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris). In between those studio discs, the band released Mountain Tracks Volume 1-IV, issued on Frog Pad Records, and each capturing the energy of its increasingly popular live shows. Their last studio release, "Yonder Mountain String Band" was produced by rock producer Tom Rothrock (Foo Fighters, Elliot Smith, Beck) creating a sound for the band that continues to close the gap between bluegrass and rock. It's an album that “represents us more than any other record we’ve done,” states Aijala, “because it incorporates more of our musical influences than ever before. It’s a really cool thing to be a part of and I’ll never take for granted just how lucky we are to do what we do. It makes me more excited for the future.”
With little radio support, Yonder Mountain has become one of the fastest rising touring bands in the country, its fanbase having ballooned over the past five years through steady gigging and high-profile festival sets, all of which are full of improv and none of which feature the same set list. “Now that we’re maturing as performers, our improvisation is more beholden to playing with good tone, good feel, good timing,” says Johnston.
It can’t be understated just what the band has achieved with that untraditional banjo/bass/mandolin/guitar line-up. Using bluegrass as its bedrock, the band has grown like few rock bands even do these days. “It’s funny,” says Austin. “But now we’re selling out Red Rocks in Denver, just 40 miles from where we became a band.” Yonder will return to Red Rocks August 2nd after last year's triumphant sold-out show. This summer will be a big year for the band with a co-headline tour with longtime collaborator Keller Williams, lots of festivals (Bonnaroo, Rothbury, Telluride Bluegrass, the band's own North West String Summit), and ending the summer with a hometown show at Red Rocks.
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