Urban Driftwood is the sophomore album by Yasmin Williams, a fingerstyle guitarist from northern Virginia. Williams started playing electric guitar as a teenager after beating Guitar Hero 2 on the highest difficulty, and soon discovered that acoustic guitar allowed her to combine fingerstyle playing with the lap-tapping she had learned playing the videogame. From there she began to develop an unique style, influenced by Hendrix and other shredders she’d grown to love from Guitar Hero, as well as the smooth jazz and R&B from her childhood. “Music was a perennial source of joy in my household,” Williams describes. “Music was played everywhere—in our house, in our family car, at family gatherings, and everywhere else.”
Yasmin Williams has been playing guitar ever since, releasing her first EP when still in tenth grade, as well as a debut full-length in 2018. Urban Driftwood, released via SPINSTER, confirms the promise of these earlier releases, a dazzlingly skillful collection that weaves a web of melody and percussion using guitars, other stringed instruments and a mic’d wooden board that Williams plays with tap shoes. The compositions are intricate and spacious, evoking nature in the way a thousand small details coalesce to form a cohesive whole.
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But Williams doesn’t create these intricate songs unnecessarily. Her technical ability and dexterous flare are backed up with a dedication to storytelling, confronting not just the difficult year in which it was recorded but the centuries of inequality and white supremacy that are present both in music and the world at large. Following legendary black female guitarists like Elizabeth Cotten, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Algia Mae Hinton, Williams carves a space for herself in a genre that is typically unwelcoming to anyone who isn’t a white man.
In doing so, she casts a light on the fact that fingerstyle guitar has deep roots in Black cultural history, something which is true for many genres of American music. A fact that Yasmin Williams is quick to point out, “Most music in the U.S. derives from Black music anyway,” she says. “Since white male musicians were much more marketable back in the early and mid 1900s, they were held in the highest regard for basically stealing music that was much older than them.”
Urban Driftwood also has a strong African influence. Williams plays the kora, an instrument favoured by the bard-like musician/historian griots of West Africa, and the title track also features hand drumming on a djembe by Amadou Kouyate. These references trace Black cultural history back even further, celebrating the African origins of what would go on to become American. “I’m proud to be able to musically join my experiences as a Black American playing this style of music with West African musical traditions,” Williams explains, “since the former was definitely inspired by the latter.”
For a record that sets out to challenge long-held falsehoods and address contemporary injustices, Urban Driftwood is a remarkably peaceful listen. There’s a tranquility across the ten tracks, a meditative quality that again goes back to patterns and rhythms of the natural world. The result is the feeling that the songs are not a challenge at all, rather the continuation of something old and meaningful, something that has itself been challenged, but refused to give in.
Nowhere is this clearer than on the final song, ‘After the Storm’, which Williams finished in the Spring of 2020 and socio-political tragedies it brought with it. But rather than expressing those feeling with anger or frustration, Williams instead turned to hope. The song, which she describes as “a collective exhale and sigh of relief, one that the country desperately needed but wasn’t sure it would ever get,” focuses on a the potential for brighter days ahead. “I was hoping that the country would figure out how we got to this moment,” Williams says. “And, after surviving 2020, how we can make sure that we promote a better future for everyone for the centuries to come.”
Urban Driftwood is out now on SPINSTER and you can get it from the Yasmin Williams Bandcamp page.
Album art by Louis Munroe, photo by Kim Atkins Photography