Charlie Wood

Great song lyrics have always been something of a rarity: the trouble started as soon as someone figured out that "moon" rhymes with "June". But it isn't just feebleminded nostalgia calling when one hankers for the scintillating days of Cole Porter and Larry Hart. Just as pop is increasingly confected to the standards set by processed cheese, so its words come to resemble the line-by-line symmetry of scripted jingles. I don't expect Dorothy Parker or William Wordsworth, but when rappers are constantly thumbing their thesaurus for new flourishes of the vernacular, why is it that nine-to-five songwriters settle for ever more mundane language?

What set off this chain of thought wasn't so much a blizzard of mediocrity, but a writer whose current unassuming offering is the only record so far this year that has made me laugh out loud at the sheer pleasure of it. Fittingly, Charlie Wood is from Memphis, Tennessee, the spiritual home of one of the wittiest writers in the style, Chuck Berry; Who I Am (Go Jazz) is Wood's second album. He sings in a lean, unblemished voice which has the high, lonesome timbre of a dedicated bluesman: in fact, he's an English major whose bashful erudition keeps peeking through lyrics that refuse to settle for the easy way to the end of the verse. Take, for example, these lines from track two, the devastating put-down song "Don't You Ever Stop Talking": "Did your daddy not have time to listen to you whine?/Did your best friend get the best part in the school play every year?/Were your lips taped shut by mama, or some other Freudian trauma?/Bet it couldn't beat the suffering that you're doling out here."

I could fill up the rest of the page with Wood's quotable quotations. But, in most cases, his titles tell enough of a story: "You Are Not Among Friends"; "Back When I Was Stupid"; "The Art of Leaving Well Enough Alone".

The man is never at a loss for words, and words fill up these songs. But the results aren't the tiresome, wise-guy fills that sometimes masquerade for urbanity. Wood measures his way through a song. He loves the sound of a good line, but he's shy about beating us over the head with it, preferring to let us notice it for ourselves. The penultimate track is an almost medicinal rejoinder to the rest of the record: in "Look at the Moon", the author muses on a natural wonder and suggests that we might benefit if we "Turn off the television, hang up the telephone/Log off the internet and look at the moon".

Wood draws heavily on Mose Allison, the Mississippi bluesman-poet par excellence; with a delivery that stretches from laconic to aggrieved, he has the Allison tinge down to a fine shade of accuracy. But there's something else that sets the record apart: the sound of it. Most contemporary records, of whatever style, are subject to so much studio doctoring that the musicians involved are in deep trouble if asked to reproduce them in a live context. Wood's band -- himself on the sturdy old Hammond B-3 organ, with guitar, drums and occasional horns and saxes for assistance--play the music in a sound mix that is thick, hot and necessarily heavy -- no glamorous reverb, nothing that makes you think the players aren't there, giving you their best just the other side of the speakers. Sometimes it's easy to be shocked by how full and immediate a live band can be, having spent many listening hours in front of neutered and cosmeticised records. Who I Am has the wallop of a live album, but with a degree of finesse that b etrays the care and thought that's gone into it.

At the close of it, Wood turns in a song called "20th Century", a double-edged farewell to that long-ago time. Or has it really gone? "Heavy on chronology, easy on theology/It's just Justinian, not solar, not lunar/Not really begun till two thousand and one." Book him for next New Year's Eve. - The New Statesman

Southbound was the album that made jazz great Ben Sidran take notice of the young Charlie Wood. Wood, who was already establishing himself as one of Memphis' most respected blues organists, self-produced the disc in 1995, two years before Sidran brought it to international release on Go Jazz. Even at a concise ten tracks, Southbound did more than just announce the presence of a master Hammond B-3 player; it revealed Wood as a versatile bandleader capable of tackling tricky New Orleans funk ("Man on the Money"), torchy jazz in the style of Charles Brown ("After All"), and even sweet Motown soul ("Lucky Charm") in addition to the standard bluesy shuffles usually purveyed by the instrument's followers. Evidence of Wood's irony-laden lyrical style pops up on occasion -- earthy tunes like "It All and Everything" and "River of Jive" are a precursor to the kind of material he would fill an entire album with on Who I Am -- but for the most part, it's the performances themselves that are the heart and soul of Southbound. Punchy horn fills from Jim Spake and Fred Ford keep things exciting, and Wood's understated vocals (which vaguely recall Donald Fagen circa mid-period Steely Dan) sound fresh throughout. ~ Kenneth Bays, All Music Guide - All Music Guide

For years, Charlie Wood has been one of the jewels of Beale Street, his ongoing residency at King's Palace Café providing one of the most consistent and perhaps the most distinctive live musical experiences to be had on the famous strip.
People think of the blues and of Beale as being guitar-driven, but Wood is a piano man - or organ man, to be more specific. His accomplished, witty playing is rooted in jazz and blues but with echoes of rock, pop, and even gospel. As a singer and lyricist, he has a light, cerebral touch. The result is regional roots music that traces its origins less to a Mississippi bluesman like Muddy Waters than to a more urbane showman such as Arkansas' Louis Jordan.
With drummer Renardo Ward and guitarist Gerard Harris completing his trio, Wood provides sharp, snappy good-time music that stimulates the body and the brain. You can see it live most nights at King's Palace, and you can also hear it on his new album, Somethin' Else, which opens with a dizzy burst of solo piano and unfolds into a series of stylistically varied takes on Woods' jazz/blues template. On "Memphis," an autobiographical ode to his Bluff City base, Wood opens with "I heard a gray-haired old musician say/That on the vaudeville circuit back in his day/They said the two worst nights you could ever play/Were Sunday night and Memphis" and goes on for five more minutes of funny-because-it's-true observations on his hometown and his place in it. "Memphis" is the highlight of Somethin' Else but only the beginning of its treats.
Wood celebrates the release of Somethin' Else Wednesday, August 31st, at King's Palace. Doors open at 6 p.m.; music starts at 7 p.m. - Chris Herrington - The Memphis Flyer

The sublimely talented Wood might be the aesthete's choice of the bunch. He's a brainy but entirely unpretentious songwriter and a player with jazz chops and soul feel. Wood is justly famous on the local scene as an organ and piano player, but on Lucky he does a Prince/Stevie Wonder impression, playing everything but horns and harmonica on an album he also produced, recorded, and mixed.
Wood is often thought of as a jazz player, but Lucky is a blues-themed record.The opening "Can't Teach That Stuff"jumpstarts the record with a blast of barrelhouse piano and a sharp tribute to hometown blues culture.
"When I was just a kid I used to go downtown / Hit this little blues joint that was down underground," Wood sings. "You bought a $3 set-up / Yopu didn't need no I.D / But that piano player down there / One night he put the blues on me."
When Wood sings, "He was tearin' it up / He was having big fun / He was 79 going on 21," it's easy to picture the late Mose Vinson, a Beale regular during Wood's earlier years on the scene.
Wood also shows off his songwriting chops on the stirring tribute "Can't Stop New Orleans." Over some strutting Crescent City R&B, Wood tosses out some prickly, pointed lines: "The people in the Quarter might have caught a little break / But the people in the 9th ward got more than they could take / They had to fight to survive," Wood snaps.
Musically, Wood offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the blues. In addition to these barrelhouse and N'awlins variants, there's some serious slow-burn blues on covers such as Percy Mayfield's "The River's Invitation" and the Doc Pomus-penned, Ray Charles-identified "Lonely Avenue." And on the Soulsville groove of "Ear Candy," Wood makes like a one-man Stax rhythm section, playing Skip Pitts (who provided the iconic guitar on Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft") and Booker T. Jones.
Wood ends the record by bringing the sound back to something like its source, teaming with Gibson on a playful reading of the W.C. Handy classic "Beale Street Blues."

-Chris Herrington - Memphis Magazine