At last month’s Earl Scruggs Music Festival, the Wood Brothers might have seemed a tad out of left field for a gathering dedicated to the late bluegrass picker. And yet, the same could be said whenever the trio is on a bill at a jam-band show, jazz night, or some blues club. But that’s the beauty of the roots-rock act: The Wood Brothers encompass the essence of any genre thrown their way.
“Bluegrass [is] an amalgamation of different traditions, as is a lot of jazz,” singer-guitarist Oliver Wood tells Rolling Stone backstage at Scruggs. “And in the big picture, that’s kind of what we’re trying to do. What makes us happy is to take these different traditions and mix them together.”
Sitting backstage with Wood is his brother, bassist Chris Wood, and multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix. Initially, the siblings formed a duo in 2004, with Rix coming aboard in 2011. Before that, the brothers were already well-established in other bands: Oliver in Atlanta-based blues/funk outfit King Johnson, Chris as part of Brooklyn jazz fusionists Medeski, Martin & Wood.
“I think the blessing and the curse is that we started so late,” Chris says. “I’ve done a lot of maturing since then, learned a lot, and got my ass kicked in plenty of ways. But at least we weren’t kids getting together and starting a brother band.”
Since their inception, the Wood Brothers have created a unique artistic world that combines Oliver’s deep love of rock, blues, and folk with Chris’ passion for jazz, classical, and improvisation, all aligning with the steadfast anchor of Rix’s percussive talents and sonic curiosity.
“You evolve as a human, you evolve as a musician, you evolve as a band,” Oliver says. “We always talk about how no matter how weird we get — or want to get — in the studio, it still sounds like us. We are still us, and the core of us has been around for a long time. It’s not going to go away. It’s really fun.”
The intricate, musical prowess and creative freedom within the Wood Brothers is apparent on their latest album, Puff of Smoke. The record is signature Oliver, Chris, and Jano cooking up a vibrant, melodic stew — part big-tent soul revival, part joyous dive into the abyss of whatever itch each member is wanting to scratch.
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“I’m not the bee’s knees/I’m not the seventh son/I’m not the Hoodoo man/I’m not the chosen one,” Oliver howls on the uplifting “Witness,” featuring Dave Matthews Band saxophonist Jeff Coffin.
“If you do it long enough, you finally get this full-circle moment of where you’re playing music now as sort of a seasoned person, [where it] starts to feel once again like it did when you were psyched about it as a kid,” Chris says. “There was no thought of pressure or being something special or amazing, you were just attracted to it and playful.”
“Sometimes you find you were really ‘living the dream’ when you were 10 years old,” Rix adds.
That playfulness and innocence is heard across the entirety of Puff of Smoke, but also delivered each night onstage by the band. In the years leading up to the formation of the Wood Brothers, Oliver and Chris had been living apart, each wandering their own respective paths from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. But that all changed during one family Christmas.
“We hung out with different people, still playing music, but we were just not very close,” Oliver says. “[Christmas] gave us a way to reconnect as brothers, just to play and have this in common, share this knowledge and have fun. It didn’t start off, ‘Let’s have a career together.’ It was more, ‘Hey, when I see you at Christmas, we’re going to jam and it’s going to be fun.’”
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“There was definitely a spark,” Chris says. “The way [Oliver] plays music, I strangely relate to it, and I have a chemistry with him the same way I had with [Medeski, Martin & Wood]. I recognized the brother-ness of him, the familiarity. It just became obvious: ‘Let’s do something.’”
By 2011, the brothers decided they needed a drummer and Rix entered the fray.
“We were starting to play larger venues and we wanted to go up to another gear sonically,” Oliver says. “When we met Jano, we didn’t know he played keyboards just as well as he plays drums, or that he could sing so well.”
“There’s a lot of fluidity that I didn’t realize was going on until I started playing with you guys,” Rix says to the brothers. “And that’s what I liked about it. It was an intangible thing. You could just feel your way through things.”
“That’s also part of a blues-country tradition — phrases, pregnant pauses for dramatic effect, the way you deliver a lyric,” Chris adds. “Or in orchestral music, you want to let ‘this’ hang out there for a moment. That’s the natural thing to do when you’re paying attention to melody and lyrics.”
Chris see his time playing as a power trio with Medeski, Martin & Wood as paving the way for the Wood Brothers. Now, when asked if he’s come full circle, he can’t help but smile.
“It just comes down to ‘this moment,’ right? That’s all you have to work with,” Chris says. “It’s so simple when you start saying it out loud: ‘Can you enjoy yourself right now?’ The hardest part is remembering that that’s the truth.”
Pushing into late fall, the Wood Brothers will hit the road on a tour that kicks off in Knoxville on Nov. 6. They also just announced their return to Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium for a headlining gig March 5.
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“It’s hard to imagine it happening any better,” Oliver says of the band’s trajectory. “We haven’t been spoiled by major success — I think that would ruin it.”
“Slow rise to the middle,” Chris chuckles. “That’s our mantra.”