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• Jazz Times

  Charlie Wood - Flutter and Wow
  January 2010

  Remember the first time you heard Dylan, or Springsteen, or Costello, or Waits? Charlie Wood delivers that same jolt. If, that is, "Flutter and Wow" is the first you've heard from the Memphis jazz-blues maestro. Hopefully you already know his astounding nod to Booker T., Sam & Dave, Ray Charles, Al Green, and a host of other pioneers on "R&B-3" and his equally forthright "Somethin' Else." If not, "Flutter and Wow" will send you scrambling for as much Wood back catalog as you can unearth.

  It will also expose you to the entire breadth of Wood's brilliance. First, there's his exemplary taste in songwriters: the best of the best - Costello, Waits, Sexsmith, Cohen, Simon- all covered here. Then there are his own tunes: wry, funny, tack-sharp, intelligent without the slightest hint of condescension, and crafted with the same respect for wordplay as Porter or Frishberg or Mose Allison. There's also his singular way with a keyboard - any keyboard, whether it's attached to a Baby Grand, a B3 or a Wurlitzer. Finally, there's the melting pot of influences that Wood synthesizes. They vary from project to project - his tastes are that catholic - but here they range from deep within the Stax and Atlantic vaults to the growl and moan of Eric Burdon, the otherworldly lilt of Donald Fagen, and the scorched majesty of Kurt Elling.

  As a nightcap to this heady brew, Wood ends with "A Song," a deceptively simple title for a slice of ingenuity involving a saloon song about the death of saloon songs.

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• Blues Revue

  CHARLIE WOOD'S MEMPHIS MEMORIES

  Having relocated from the Bluff City to the U.K., singer-songwriter Wood looks back on his time with Albert King, lessons learned on Beale Street, and the lasting influence of Mose Allison.

  by Larry Nager

  GLANCE at this singer/pianist's bio and you might think you're dealing with a Delta piano king of bygone days. Born and raised in Memphis, he apprenticed with an older blues master before taking off on his own to hone his skills on Beale Street. He learned how to win over that city's notoriously tough crowds,but, frustrated by the hardscrabble life the home of the blues afforded its musicians, he followed the expatriate road to Europe's more salubrious musical climate.

  Memphis Slim? Eddie Boyd?

  Nope, we're talking about Charlie Wood, a suburban white kid who stands firmly in the venerable Memphis music tradition. "It's a wonderful place to be from," Wood says during one of his increasingly rare visits to his hometown, "and it gives you something, to be from here, that you can't get elsewhere - musically, not just in a marketing sense. It does that, too, but it gives you an approach other people just don't have. They can appreciate it, but they don't think about music the way people from Memphis do."

  That's not just hometown pride. Things are different in Memphis. Among local musicians, the biggest difference is their approach to timing: Memphis players hang as far behind the beat as they can without actually falling off.

  "It has to do with a relaxed feel, a laid-back approach to time, and timing, in music," Wood explains. "People from here lay way back, and they're probably not even conscious of it until they do a session somewhere else and they're told to stop playing so much behind the beat."

  But he points out another element of Memphis music, one that runs through the country blues of Furry Lewis and Gus Cannon and up to Wood's original material. "People have a strong sense of humor here and a strong sense of irony - of things being other than how they seem, and that being OK and kind of funny - not only verbally, but even in instrumentalists. People are resigned to the impossibility of having a clear idea of what's going on."

  You can hear plenty of that ironic humor on Wood's latest album, Flutter and Wow. In the past, he's recorded straight blues and funky jazz on both piano and organ, but here, working with Adam Levy (Norah Jones' guitarist) as producer, Wood takes a different approach. "Both with my compositions and with the tunes we picked to cover, we wanted to emphasize the singer-songwriter aspect of what I do," Wood says.

  Flutter and Wow includes material by four of the best contemporary singer-songwriters - Paul Simon's "American Tune," Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," Tom Waits' "Johnsburg, Illinois," and the title track, penned by Elvis Costello. And though Wood doesn't cover him here, the influence of the great Mississippi blues pianist/raconteur Mose Allison can be heard in Wood's own songs on the album, notably "Let's Get Up and Walk Around."

  Love for Allison's music runs deep in the Wood family. Both parents are musical: Wood's father, Mike, was an amateur drummer, and his mother, Willie, plays piano. Charlie started taking piano lessons at 7. A few years later, his father introduced him to Allison's music. "When I was about 12, he gave me his copy of [1960's] 'I Love the Life I Live' on vinyl. He probably thought he was loaning it to me," Wood says with a laugh. "But at least it's still in the family."

  Wood, now 42, studied classical piano and jazz in high school and college, including a stint at Tulane in New Orleans, before finishing up at Memphis State (now called the University of Memphis). At the latter, he studied with legendary pianist/educator Gene Rush, head of the school's jazz program.

  Elvis Presley and the Memphis blues tradition are the city's biggest musical claims to fame, but there's also a strong jazz tradition - particularly jazz piano - that goes back to the genre's pioneers, notably Lil Armstrong, the Memphis-born pianist who famously bested Jelly Roll Morton in a cutting contest and played with Joe "King" Oliver and Louis Armstrong's early bands (and was Armstrong's second wife). More recently, Memphis' jazz-piano pantheon has included Phineas Newborn, Harold Mabern, James Williams, and Donald Brown.

  Jazz might have been Wood's first love, but in 1990 he got a dose of the blues - or as he tells it, maybe an overdose _ when he hit the road with Albert King. It was a serious learning experience for the 22-year-old.

  "He was a force of nature, an amazing guy," Wood says of the guitarist and notoriously irascible bandleader. "It was tough. It was often very, very unpleasant, and I think anybody you ask who did it will say the same. People called it boot camp. But you certainly learned the realities of the road and how to make things work, how to economize and how to get from point to point and keep body and soul together, 'cause there often wasn't a lot of compensation. And you learned how to do a show, for sure."

  From there, Wood's next move was to Beale Street, just as the revival hit its stride with the opening of B.B. King's Blues Club. Wood landed a regular gig at King's Palace, a restaurant/bar that had kept live music on Beale for years. If his stint with King taught him how to deal with tough bosses, King's Palace taught Wood how to handle tough crowds. More than one Memphis musician has admitted the need to be able to sing, dance, do comedy - anything to get the audience's attention. It's true that they play behind the beat, but Memphis' versatile musicians have to work their butts off to stay ahead of crowds.

  "The type of venues you have in Memphis @ tend to encourage a lack of attention to the performers," Wood explains. "Most places people play are not designed for listening audiences; they're designed for music as something that goes on in addition to what [else] is happening."

  Wood says one reason for that is the city's quirky laws. "You have to serve food along with liquor, so basically every place you play winds up being a restaurant to some degree. In other places, you can have a theater where you could serve alcohol and not have a meal. I like playing in places where people listen."

  King's Palace became Wood's postgrad work, as he had to figure out how to distract audiences from their dry-rubbed ribs. "You get a lot of training in how to handle different audiences," he explains. "Some nights you'll have a crowd that's listening really attentively, and other nights you get a crowd that's barely aware you're there. My take was always to interact as much or as little as they seemed to feel comfortable with. In a place like that, it's not going to be a loud, rowdy electric blues thing. It's a more gentle form of music that I play, so if they were feeling rowdy, I might play them a few Ray Charles tunes or an Otis Redding tune. And if they were feeling sedate, I might play them a jazz standard. That was good for me, in that I got to build a really eclectic song list. I took pride in being able to play a wide variety of material. But at this point in my career, it's important to emphasize the composition aspect as well as performance."

  Playing all those covers served as a course in songcraft, Wood says. He cites Elmore James ('The Sky Is Crying," in particular), Willie Dixon (whom he first heard through Allison), and Percy Mayfield as favorite blues songwriters.

  "Those are guys I draw on that I probably should draw on more," Wood says. 'They write very simply. I've compared it to haiku. It's a very tight little form, the blues verse. And getting it right, with a minimum of words and also with a perceived minimum of effort, is important. It has to sound natural, but when it's done right, it's really, really effective."

  Wood, who had played Europe a few times previously, moved to England in 2009. Touring is easier there; on a trip the distance from Memphis to Little Rock, you might cross several international borders.

  "The appreciation for the music is very strong there," Wood says. "There's a lot more awareness of the history of sound recordings and individual artists. And the touring circuit is a lot more robust than it is in the United States. There are plenty of places to play in the States, certainly, but they don't pay particularly well and they're physically much further apart. And all that makes it difficult to put on a full-scale tour in the U.S. I think people here consider it more a promotional expense than a way to make a living, but in Europe you actually can make a living doing that."

  And making a living remains Wood's modest goal. He knows that intelligent, adult songs built on more than three chords probably won't make him rich and famous. "The kind of music I write and play, it's always going to be a long haul," he says. "If there's some reasonable degree of commercial success, it's the exception and not the rule. The main job is just sort of slogging away and doing what I do and being hopeful that there's a market for it. It's not a huge market, but there is a market for it."

  But Wood still loves the music, and he's happy writing his blues- and jazz-influenced songs and playing them for a growing audience. He hopes to expand his audience further with Flutter and Wow and increased festival work in the States. He's still less than enthusiastic about the "touring" part of being a touring musician, but he faces it with a shrug and some of that famous Memphis irony.

  "There's no way around it," he says, chuckling. "Like B.B. King said, 'I play for free. They pay me to travel.'"

  Selected Discography:

  Southbound (1996) Go Jazz Records
  Who I Am (2000) Go Jazz Records
  Somethin' Else (2005) Daddy-O Records
  Lucky (2006) Inside Sounds
  Charlie Wood & the New Memphis Underground (2007) Daddy-O Records
  Flutter and Wow (2009) Archer Records

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• JazzReview
  Featured Artist: Charlie Wood
  CD Title: Flutter and Wow
  Year: 2009
  Record Label: Archer Records
  Style: Jazz Vocals

  Musicians: C. Wood (vocals, keyboards), Adam Levy (guitars, producer), Sam Shoup (acoustic bass), Tom Lonardo (drums), Billy Gibson (harmonica), Jim Spake (sax), others.

  Review:

  In some old movie and TV dramas (that is, pre- 1965), there be a singer/pianist working at a local bistro/watering hole wherein the main character/hero/protagonist hangs out. This singer (usually male, rarely female) would often be a pal, confidant, and/or an informant of the main character, or simply sing some cool songs to provide or accent the mood or "atmosphere" for the movie. Hoagy Carmichael, Bobby Troup, or Hadda Brooks, all fine (and iconic) performer/writers of songs, would be tapped for this role of "hep Greek chorus." If a hip director or screenwriter would like to assign such a movie part in our modern times, whom might be considered? Of the old guard, not many are left: Mose Allison, Georgie Fame, Tom Waits, perhaps the aging pop star Billy Joel (give credit where it's due - listen to his "Piano Man" hit)...but if s/he wanted a younger hepcat to be the piano-driven songster for their Slow Club or Le Chat Bleu scenes, I got the guy: Charlie Wood.

  This Wood fellow plays both sides of the street - he writes his own (the swaggering soul-jazz flavored "Let's Get Up and Walk Around Some") and knows how to cherry-picky good 'uns from other pros (Waits' laconically yearning "Johnsburg, Illinois," Paul Simon, Elvis Costello). Wood's voice is as genuine as the soot on your Akron windowsill and the gin-mill smell from Anywheresville, USA - a born storyteller with a slight drawl and strong old-school Memphis soul/R&B undertones, Wood recalls Allison, Fame, and Jack Sheldon (though his phrasing is much smoother) and occasionally Van Morrison, with a touch of Randy Newman. Musically, it walks the line betwixt jazz and blues, a la Dr. John and Uncle Mose. As a songster, Charlie Wood embodies hepcat worldliness and barroom empathy; he's got style but also the wisdom that gives it heftiness. Whether that movie gets made or not, catch him.

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• BlogCritics.org
  Charlie Wood - Flutter and Wow
  Oct 26, 2009

  If I lived in Memphis, I'd already have known who Charlie Wood was. Having begun his career in 1990 as Albert King's touring pianist, for years Wood and his trio were a fixture on Memphis' Beale Street, exploring that beguiling intersection where blues, rock, and jazz meet. But I'd never heard of the guy; I picked up this album on a whim, curious to hear the five cover songs he'd chosen to include. I see no point in covering another artist's work unless you put a new twist on the original song; on that score, Charlie Wood succeeds brilliantly. He turns Paul Simon's "American Song" (a tune that Simon himself ripped off from Bach) into an irresistible finger-snapper, and Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" into a menacing slinky tango. He splashes some extra funky swing into Elvis Costello's "Flutter and Wow," gives a syncopated jolt of soul to Ron Sexsmith's "Not Too Big," and layers lush cocktail-lounge sophistication onto Tom Waits' wistful "Johnsburg, Illinois." These covers work so well, in some cases I even prefer them to the originals. Lured in by the covers, I stayed to sample Wood's own songs - and I was pleasantly surprised. If that sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, think again. It's a rare delight to sink into an album this effortlessly pleasurable - the musical equivalent of a damned good read. And there are surprises on every track, for Wood is an absurdly versatile keyboardist. On "Doing the Blah Blah Blah" he channels Allen Toussaint's elegant brand of New Orleans funk; the boogie-woogie of "Be My Ball" evokes Dr. John, and "Last Dance" dives into a jazz-rock groove in the vein of Donald Fagen. The wordplay and bluesy bop of "Let's Get Up and Walk Around" are pure Mose Allison, while "Up in the Attic" percolates with Georgie Fame-style pop-infused jazz. By the time Wood hits the gentle samba of "What You Will" (to my ears the standout track on the album) I've given up trying to trace the bloodlines of Wood's eclectic style. Name-checking all those influences makes this album sound derivative; I assure you, it absolutely isn't.

  Wood's nimble fingering and muscular sense of rhythm lend his songs an irresistible swing, but it's his butterscotch-smooth tenor - flirting, cajoling, scolding, teasing - that truly makes this album engaging. While jazz purists and blues hardliners may dismiss Wood's sound as easy listening, I'm betting that producer Adam Levy - best known as Norah Jones' guitarist - came on board specifically to win Charlie Wood more of a crossover audience (hence the eclectic choice of covers). That's a tough leap to make, but this album could be the springboard for Wood to find the wider audience he deserves. Charlie Wood's music isn't driven by social commentary or personal confession; it doesn't strive to be provocative or profound. What it does have is consummate musicianship, tight arrangements, and songs that'll lift your spirits -- and all that is intentional. Wood finally declares his musical manifesto in the album's last track, simply titled "A Song" - a ready-made jazz standard, something I could easily hear sung by Harry Connick Jr. or Ben Sidran (not coincidentally, one of Charlie Wood's champions). "Before everyone got indoctrinated," Wood sings wistfully, "Before everything had been bought and sold / Remember how music intoxicated? / How it got in your heart and your head and took hold?" He's clever to wait until the last track before laying out his creed - by then he's proven that he has the musical chops to intoxicate us whenever he wants. -Holly Hughes

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• MOJO
  Charlie Wood
  ****
  Flutter and Wow
  ARCHER
  More of the elan of that Memphis man!

  Now on album four, Memphian Charlie Wood is building on Mose Allison's nightclub jazz/blues foundations, but has a greater emotional span as measured by the songs he covers here: American Tune (Paul Simon), Not Too Big (Ron Sexsmith), Johnsburg, Illinois (Tom Waits), a fabulous Everybody Knows (Leonard Cohen) and the title track (Elvis Costello). Like Costello without the jitters, Wood the songsmith switches from playful pasticheur to pensive poet; owner of a big, clear and warm voice and prodigious technique on piano, Wurlitzer and Hammond B-3, he evokes the rolling Mississippi rather than the Mersey, Thames or Tyne. Also like Costello, he's studio old-school, cutting this album on two-inch magnetic tape with a crack band, including the album's producer, Adam Levy of Norah Jones fame, on guitar. The sound is grade-A natural beauty. As is the whole swinging album - enjoy! -Mat Snow

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• Blues In Britain
  Charlie Wood - Flutter and Wow
  Archer Records 33193024

  42 minutes and 45 seconds of sheer delight! Wood is not only an appealing and skilled keyboard player and singer, he's a writer of killer songs that express modern themes with old style artistry. His MySpace page lists Mose Allison, Percy Mayfield and Ray Charles among his influences. I was also reminded of Harry Connick Jr, Georgie Fame and, to go way back, Hoagy Carmichael - and their fans are likely to enjoy this album too. 5 of the 12 tracks are well chosen covers from Paul Simon, Ron Sexsmith, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and the title track by Elvis Costello. Most of the songs are played as a basic quartet of Wood with Sam Shoup on bass, Tom Lonardo on drums and producer Adam Levy on guitar. A horn section enhances two tracks and Billy Gibson plays harmonica on two more.

  On Cohen's "Everybody Knows" the darkly atmospheric feeling of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores are recreated with an unexpected verse of whistling and later Gibson's breathy harmonica. During "Up In the Attic" Levy (I think) creates some eerie pipe work sound effects behind evocative lyrics: "Who is this guy trying to be? // That's my name, but who is he? // Auto-archeology // Investigating being me." The closer, "A Song," recalls the age of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and the Gershwins with a suitably wistful melody carrying words that regret today's corporate stranglehold on popular music: "Before everyone got indoctrinated // Before everything had been bought and sold // Remember how music intoxicated? // How it got in your heart and your head and took hold?" Well, yes I do, Charlie. Thank God a few people like you still believe in doing it that way. Rating: 10 -Kit Packham

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