Kaki King, stylist.

There is a reason this woman is such an important stylist.  More than anyone else in the "percussive acoustic" genre that I've heard thus far, she throws in unexpected little phrases that are unsettlingly "not right", and yet they are perfect.  If you only heard it once, it would be tempting to call it an elegantly-handled mistake (via Tom Redmond:  "If you play a wrong note, play it again"), but no, this happens too often to be unintentional.

The following contains a couple examples of this, and is otherwise just a beautiful piece, excellently played.  She lulls you in, and then hits your ears with a "wait, what was that?" and then is back.  It's a nice touch here, too, on a reasonably conventional fingerstyle composition. 



The more I hear from King, the more that I hear this as what makes her unique among her peers.  You get the same sort of thing in her flashier, percussive work, or in her brooding improvs--all of it.  I think at some level I just like her particular choice of dissonances (and love the fact that she seems to improvise them), but still:  when the "wait, what was that?" question arrives from the ears to the brain, it's reliably King who is playing.

Flat picker Dan Crary has long impressed me with his stylistic signature of inverting the third in a common tune, after the melody has been firmly established:  suddenly, he's playing the same piece in parallel minor, which is a really nice aesthetic touch in bluegrass, and he'll usually return to the original arrangement to close out.  It's a simple device, really, but Crary has made it a recognizable style point, and it's almost always effective without being ham-fisted or even "leaving the genre".  What King does strikes me as very similar, but she'll charge right out into chromatic territory without warning (rather than employ airbrakes with more "tonal approaches" like parallel substitutions and quick modulations), and, well, your ears just need to keep up.  That can very, very easily fall flat on its face, or quickly get cliched and predictable (e.g., if the chromatic phrase always leaned on the flat-five), but somehow King avoids it, and it usually works.

I'm impressed, and aspire.