Beer in the Bushes with Keller Williams and More Than A Little
I live on Sanibel, a sleepy little island off the coast of Southwest Florida, where 9:30 p.m. is referred to as “Sanibel Midnight” when everything is shut down and the majority of residents have gone to bed. We have no stoplights, chain stores, crowds or nightlife. By city standards, we’re quite boring and like it that way, preferring counting sea turtle nests at dawn to partying into the wee hours.
So, it takes a hurricane or some other force of nature to shake up our blissful, humdrum existence. We got just that on Saturday, March 31st, when Keller Williams and More Than A Little blew onto the island with a jam-infused jolt of funk when they performed at Beer in the Bushes, an annual fundraiser benefiting The Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation.
Warming things up was Orlando’s Brown Bag Brass Band, a band drawing talent from a collective of musicians whose New Orleans influenced party music turned out to be an unexpected delight. Saturday’s incarnation was a quintet made up of Joseph Meadows on trumpet, Frank Wosar on trombone, Josh Parsons on tuba, Jake Jones on bass drum, and Anthony Cole on snare drum.
Now I positively love all things New Orleans and have participated in my fair share of Second Lines in the city and elsewhere. But the last place I ever thought I’d be parading with a brass band was a jungle trail used more frequently by gators and bobcats than people. This absolutely gets filed in my memory bank under the heading “Weird and Wonderful.”
With the sun going down and a full moon rising over tropical preserve, Keller Williams and More Than A Little took the stage and proceeded to rock our little world with funkified jazz and soul that lifted even the most grizzled old islanders out of their camp chairs and onto the dance floor. For nearly two hours we boogied in the dirt to fan favorites like “Freeker By The Speaker” and “Hollywood Freaks” along with tracks from the band’s 2013 album Funk.
For those unfamiliar with Keller Williams, there is no box that comes close to fitting him. A star-shaped rainbow messing with the fabric of an ordinary universe is about as close as I’ll come to describing him.
I don’t think there are any musical genres he doesn’t dip into, and his one-man shows have mystified and delighted fans since the ’90s. He is best known for mastery of live phrase looping with multiple instruments, using a Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro to create what sounds like an entire band backing him up. These one-man shows are as much comedic theater as they are displays of musical prowess, which would make sense since Keller holds a degree in theater from Virginia Wesleyan College.
More Than A Little, whose core members are Keller, soul singers and front women Tonya Lazenby-Jackson and Sugah Davis, bassist EJ Shaw and drummer Toby Fairchild, is one of Keller’s numerous side projects. Others include Keller and the Keels, Grateful Grass, and Keller Williams’ Kwathro, just to name a few.
Saturday’s incarnation of the band included an addition that knocked me off my feet – none other than vibraphone destroyer, percussionist and jam hero Mike Dillon. When Dillon attacked the vibraphone throughout the night, the band gladly faded to background while he summoned the heart of Africa and the Caribbean.
A joyous appreciative audience lapped up what the band was dishing out. A whole lot of hip-swaying commenced when they opened with its every-so-funky-smooth namesake tune “More Than A Little” and didn’t stop until closing with the ubiquitous grooves of “Hey Ho Jorge.” In between, “Right Here” implored the crowd to “dance all night” before segueing into “Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads, and “Let’s Jam” flowed into “Mary Jane,” where the soulful vocals of Lazenby-Jackson and Davis were on full display.
Aside from a rock-solid rhythm section, a consistent thread running through all of Keller’s shows, including this one, are his comedic lyrics and mastery of the guitar. The man has big chops and an even bigger sense of humor, which was evident on songs like “Love Handles” and “B.I.T.C.H.,” the latter featuring Keller manipulating a tiny hand-held synthesizer that produces a keyboard-like sound called a Korg Kaossilator. Try saying that three times fast.
We left the event filled to the brim with happy and are grateful to Keller Williams and More Than A Little and Brown Bag Brass Band for participating in an evening that benefits The Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation, the guardians of our islands’ delicate ecosystems. Now in its seventh year and organized by SCCF staff and volunteers, Beer in the Bushes features local craft brewers and food trucks and raises funds to support the group’s mission to conserve coastal habitats and aquatic resources on Sanibel and Captiva.
Oh, and for this night at least, “Sanibel Midnight” did not apply. I’m happy to report that we all managed to make it to 10 p.m.