Street Dreams is the opening track of the second solo album from London keysman Kamaal Williams, and it could easily be the concept for the entire thing: a sound trapped in glass between urban reality and a more spiritual plane, shimmering as it catches the light. Lush string arrangements from LA’s Miguel Atwood-Ferguson swoon over slivers of funk bassline. Atop a gauzy sax a man’s voice is heard effusively telling a slang-filled story about swerving the police.
There’s a gentle evolution of Williams’s style of recreating the thrill of jungle and broken beat on live drums, London club culture served organic, as on 2018’s The Return. But while that album also established him as the king of the dazed meander, here he skewers Coltrane-era jazz with Pigalle, an exuberant reimagination of how a night out in 1950s Paris might have sounded.
A forerunner of the London jazz scene, Williams has always coolly evaded categorisation, whether DJing house as Henry Wu or making spectral slow jams and here it’s as if he’s attempting to reconcile those guises. He succeeds, with some surprises, flirting with glittering soul on Hold On, featuring the slurry-smoky vocals of Lauren Faith. Sweet street dreams indeed.
