Keller Williams is a Renaissance man for the digital age. Sunday he brings his controlled chaos to the Charlottesville Pavilion.
Keller's stage generally has seven or so guitars and other assorted instruments, as if the band forgot about the gig. But Keller is the band. He usually starts the show with his bread and butter: the acoustic guitar, a sweet melodic tone and some beatboxing. His performances get crazy when he uses loopers to record what he has just played, repeats it, jumps to another instrument and builds his jam session. It sounds simple, but Keller's hyper sound has fans and critics calling him a mad scientist of music.
The alchemy of Keller Williams doesn't stop there. He can play a menagerie of instruments including the bass and electric guitar, the banjo, the jaw harp, the hi-hat, the theremin (an instrument whose tone and pitch are controlled by proximity to a pair of electromagnetic field-producing poles), and the vibraphone. With his mouth, Keller makes convincing percussion and brass noises.
That said, Keller isn't the kind of performer to hide behind his instruments or digital manipulators. His lyrics are upbeat and clever and he nimbly improvises to transform an album's song in live performance. He sings about falling in love in a porta-potty line, dreaming about "The Price is Right," why he doesn't want to lose his love handles and another woman's car taking priority at the auto mechanic because she had a kidney in a cooler. Keller's songs keep listeners on their toes -- his tangential live act features small chunks of cover songs from classic Grateful Dead to Dee-Lite's "Groove is in the Heart" to Huey Lewis' "I Want a New Drug."
A native of Fredericksburg, Va., Keller left Virginia Wesleyan College in 1991. With a tip jar in hand, he began to performing as a typical singer-songwriter in restaurants and coffee shops. While touring with the String Cheese Incident in the mid-1990s, Keller learned to play the bass. He experimented with digital loopers but didn't realize their full potential until he saw Bela Fleck's brilliant bassist Victor Wooten. Alongside his wife and dog, Keller has toured relentlessly for the last decade or so, releasing studio albums, DVDs and a weekly radio show, "Keller's Cellar."
So if midterms, papers and the newly shortened reading weekend get you down, this Sunday's show will be a welcome departure. You never know what the mad scientist has brewing.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
