Most of the time when DJ Williams comes home to do a gig, it’s at one of the larger venues, like the Broadberry or Tang and Biscuit. His showmanship and guitar wizardry can fill that kind of space, but it isn’t the intimacy of a smaller club like Café Diem, or the aptly named Get Tight lounge, where Williams performs this Friday for a 20th anniversary gig.

He built a local audience with his eponymous Projekt over years of weekly gigs at Café Diem in the early years of the century. That vanished Devil’s Triangle venue is now Buddy’s, transplanted a few blocks from the Fan. And Williams too is long departed, first to Los Angeles, then to Denver, following a
career as the featured guitarist in saxophonist Karl Denson’s funk-rock Tiny Universe, and launching a West Coast “Projekt” called Shots Fired. But the original band (bassist Todd Herrington, drummer Dusty Simmons, Gordon “Saxman” Jones, trumpeter Mark Ingraham, and keyboardist Ben White)
never really disbanded. They come together when he comes home.

This is a big year for Williams. He’s in the middle of a series of coast-to-coast dates in anticipation of the release of a new album, “Soldier of Love” [Perception Records]. The new material flirts with everything from P-Funk dance floor workouts and metal riff heroics to dreamy R&B, to a cover of the
Doors classic hit “Light My Fire” reimagined as a soul duet. Whether playful or dead serious, the approach brims with eclectic self-confidence … and that huge guitar sound.

The DJ Williams Projekt plays the Get Tight Lounge on Friday, June 9. Doors are at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available on the website for $24.25.