The Wood Brothers bring progressive Americana to the Englert

From a purely geographical perspective, it was all but certain that Boulder, Colorado, natives Chris and Oliver Wood would start a jam band.

Their father, who played alongside artists like Joan Baez during the nascent 1960s folk scene, had instilled in them what would become a lifelong passion for music of all kinds. And the Boulder area became famous for birthing the jam-band genre and is still home to both veteran and up-and-coming jam bands.

But rather than start their own band in the vein of Leftover Salmon and the String Cheese Incident, the two brothers set out in different directions, both musically and geographically, for more than a decade before reuniting to form the Wood Brothers, a trio that All Music critic Steve Leggett likened to an "Americana version of jazz, or country with an edge, or folk with some rhythmic bite, or maybe secular gospel with a touch of swing,"

But the two brothers’ first forays into the realm of professional music didn’t sound much like any of those things.

Chris Wood, whose duties include playing bass and singing, headed east to make a name for himself in the New York City jazz scene, or at least that was the plan.

“I’d trained really hard playing jazz music and being a good soloist, all the techniques that you need to have,” he said in an early May interview. “I was young and naive, and all I thought was, ‘Well, you go to New York City and you become a sideman for a famous jazz musician.’ But when I got there in the ‘90s, I found that the actual jazz scene wasn't a very warm, creative, open-minded kind of scene, to put it mildly.”

Instead, the bassist found what he was searching for in the much more eclectic new-music scene

“It was an incredible ecosystem of music back then in the East Village,” he recalled. “So I was just this young, naive, white kid from Boulder, Colorado, who ended up playing in a radical Jewish music festival and the Black Rock Coalition. I was playing every style of music. Some of it was very weird and experimental. Some of it was rock and roll. Some of it was R&B. It was everything. They were all very versatile and creative musicians, and that was the scene in which Medeski Martin & Wood were formed.”

A primarily instrumental group, MMW soon drew national attention as they pushed as many envelopes as they could find, exploring different genres, finding new ways to mix genres, and, as Chris puts it, “learning what it means to be a genre.”

Oliver, meanwhile, found a prominent role in an entirely different genre. Traveling south and ending up in Atlanta, he built a following with his hard-touring band King Johnson, which released six albums of blues-infused country, r&b and funk.

“It was just something that was inside of him and natural for him,” said Chris of those influences, “because he put so much of his heart into it.”

It wasn’t until the two bands played on the same bill that the idea of finally joining forces came into being.

“I had this fantasy image in my head of like, ‘What if Robert Johnson and Charles Mingus had started a band? What would that sound like?’” Chris said.

Chris recalls the first time the reunited brothers played together in the same room.

“It was just this weird feeling, like I was looking in a kind of mirror when I was playing with him,” he said. “I just saw the way he approached the instrument, like the musical choices, his style. There was something sort of almost creepily familiar”.

Soon the siblings had turned their attention to starting the Wood Brothers, and over the course of nine albums and more than two decades, that musical familiarity has continued to grow. As a trio with drummer/keyboardist/vocalist Jano Rix, they’ve earned a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album, reached #1 on Billboard Magazine’s Top Heatseekers chart, and built a loyal fan base by touring across the United States and abroad.

The Wood Brothers’ new album, "Puff of Smoke," which was released Aug.1, is as eclectic as ever, from its pan-American influences to a Fender Rhodes keyboard and analog synth that Rix used to create an “underwater calliope” sound.

One listen to the opening track “Witness” and you’ll get the idea, or at least some of it. Oliver’s lead vocals on the verses are straight out of the Dr. John swamp-rock playbook, complete with references to the Seventh Son and the Hoodoo Man. From there, it segues into Caribbean-style acoustic interludes, choruses with catchy vocal harmonies and an extended instrumental break.

The album also includes tracks recorded with “Big Mike,” the affectionately named single microphone that the three musicians gather around at centerstage to play a few all-acoustic songs during their live shows. Oliver plays a national steel guitar with a built-in speaker cone that amplifies itself. Chris plays an upright bass with gut strings, while Jano beats on a shuitar, which Chris describes as a crappy old guitar to which the percussionist attached things that makes it sound like a weird drum kit.

With or without Big Mike, the trio continues to find ways to challenge themselves, both live and in the studio. An example from “Puff of Smoke” is the song “Pray God Listens.” The trio was in the studio, sitting around in a circle working out an arrangement, when their engineer walked in and insisted they record it on the spot. And that’s what made it onto the record.

From Chris’ perspective, an artist’s relationship to control and, to an extent, their willingness to let go of it, is an important part of the creative process. He cites the French poet Paul Valéry, who said that “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” at which point the artist should make no further changes.

“The initial writing of the idea is where all the creative fire is,” Chris said, “but then as you start editing and agonizing over this word or that word, there's a certain point where you're like, ‘This is stupid. I give up. This is fine.’ And that’s kind of what happens with the songs on a record. You work on it to the point where you're feeling the returns diminishing and diminishing and diminishing. And then you realize you're worrying about things that only you will ever notice. And that's when you just let go.”