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Live review: The Wood Brothers
Chris Wood definitely wins this year’s ‘Most Versatile ACL Musician’ award, along with ’ Festival’s Biggest Hustler’ (as in ‘hustling around,’ not ‘ripping people off’).
Just over an hour after leaving the Livestrong stage following his set with Medeski, Martin and Wood, the bass player appeared on stage with his guitar playing brother Oliver.
Chris made the switch from improvisational jazz to blues & roots with apparent ease. The brothers got the crowd into a bluesy gospel revival mood with a stirring rendition of the almost-100-year-old ‘Lil Liza Jane,’ a song made famous in the 1940s by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. The song was punctuated beautifully by the brothers’ harmonies. Oliver has a rich, booming but syrupy voice, and for a jazz bass player, Chris is no slouch on the vocals. In fact, the qualifier ‘for a bass player,’ isn’t fair. The guy can sing.
With the brothers slapping their stringed instruments while wailing, ‘I know what it means to be senseless,’ and Oliver dancing his slide up and down the fret of his acoustic guitar, the small grove of trees in which the brothers were holding court felt like it could have been in the Georgia pines.
Oliver, with a nod to the wafting scent of marijuana, acknowledged that ‘it sure smells good out there,’ and then launched into ‘One More Day,’ with a bayside bass line that sounded like the theme to ‘The Wire.’
With the boys throwing down the blues while the young crowd up front danced along, the scene was taking on a real New Orleans JazzFest vibe. And just when you thought the brothers couldn’t take us any further down South, Chris broke out his train-chugging harmonica and Oliver put his slide through the paces for the blues tune, ‘Where My Baby Might Be.’
On this breezy afternoon, the two brothers from Georgia looked like two happy towheaded little boys with old souls sitting out on the front porch without a care in the world. As one of their songs put it, ‘the older I get, the less I know and the more I dream.’
Matthew Odam photo
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