The Wood Brothers
American folk band
The Wood Brothers are an American roots band consisting of brothers Chris (upright bass) and Oliver Wood (acoustic and electric guitars), as well as multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix. Their music is a combination of folk, gospel, blues and jazz.
Biography
From early in their childhood in Boulder, Colorado, Chris and Oliver Wood were steeped in American roots music. Their late father, Bill Wood, was an esteemed scientist who had recorded on the 1960 album Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square with Joan Baez; he performed classic songs at camp fires and family gatherings, while their mother, a poet, instilled a passion for storytelling and turn of phrase. The brothers bonded over their shared appreciation of bluesmen such as Jimmy Reed and Lightnin' Hopkins, but their paths, musical and otherwise, diverged.
Oliver moved to Atlanta, where he played guitar in cover bands before earning a spot in Tinsley Ellis’s touring act. At Ellis’s behest, Oliver began to sing and then founded King Johnson, a hard-touring group that released six albums of blues-inflected R&B, funk and country over the next 12 years. Chris, meanwhile, studied jazz bass at the New England Conservatory of Music and moved to New York City. In 1992, Chris co-founded the innovative jazz fusion group Medeski Martin & Wood (MMW), which released two dozen albums over the next two decades.
After pursuing separate musical careers for some 15 years, the brothers performed together at a show in North Carolina on May 24, 2001: Oliver sat in with MMW following King Johnson’s opening set.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Wood Brothers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.