Show Review

The Keller Williams experience for the casual fan is a bit of an odd experience. If you aren’t one of his adoring hardcore fans (yes, he does have a tremendous following that seems to be growing by the second) and are only going to one of his three-hour shows to see what all of the fuss is about, you’ll likely remember the evening as anything but normal. And that would be just fine with Keller.

Opening the show with three cover songs by artists (The Who, Sheryl Crow, Simple Minds) that go together about as well as David Crosby and drugs, you could tell that Williams is damn confident of his abilities to keep a crowd entertained, no matter what he chooses to perform for them. Near the end of the Simple Minds number, one that probably had already gone on a couple minutes too long, Williams chuckled and cut it off abruptly. And although the crowd had probably already had enough of his cover choices—probably some time midway through the Sheryl Crow selection—they still cheered him on as he wasted little time in getting on with the show.

And wasting time is something Williams does very little of. Taking maybe 5 or 10 seconds in between songs, Williams is always thinking of his next move. His performances that involved his masterful looping techniques were the highlights of the show, only because you could never tell where he was going next. He’s always able to bring smiles to the faces of his fans with his spontaneity; his talents of creating grooves that almost always seem to work and fit together prove him to be the ultimate “one-man jam band.”

What comes across as unusual is that Williams is performing in front of two thousand people and keeping them happy for three hours by basically just doing whatever comes natural to him. It’s a very odd scene to take in if you don’t know a whole lot of his material, because more times than not, you have no idea if he’s performing his own material, playing someone else’s song, or just making something up. And of course, one could argue that he’s making it all up—which might be the beauty of Keller Williams—that every note is his. Jam on.