MEMPHIS-born Charlie Wood now resides in England where his formidable talents as a singer, pianist, songwriter and arranger have been massively acclaimed. But he still regards his years spent in relative obscurity in his home town, as resident pianist in the King’s Palace club on Beale Street, as crucial to his current success.
“I started there in 1990 and finished in 2006, and there would be 10 other bands playing on the same street the same night,” he reminisces. “It was wonderful to be able to walk up and down the street and hear those other players.
“And playing four hours a night, seven nights a week, was an important learning experience because you constantly need to be coming up with new songs. And playing to audiences of maybe a hundred people is really good because you’re very connected to them and you get a really good sense of how you’re going over so that makes you a more engaged performer.”
In 2014 Wood was honoured with a Brass Note on the Beale Street Hall Of Fame, the Memphis equivalent of a star on Hollywood Boulevard and an honour previously accorded to BB King, Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson, among others.
“It’s a long list of really illustrious musicians whom I’ve admired so much,” he says. “It’s great to be included among them and to be recognised for having put so much of my life into that street.”
Wood has most often been compared to the great Mississippi singer-pianist-composer Mose Allison.
“He’s a hero of mine and a huge influence,” he agrees. “I would take that comparison as very high praise. I like that each of his songs tends to be about something quite distinct and that has enabled him to write many, many songs without repeating himself.”
Wood’s current album, New Souvenirs, shows that he is himself an exceptional songwriter whose often ruminative songs feature well-honed, literate lyrics. Ghost Town, for one, is written with the technical precision and linguistic flair of a Great American Songbook classic by Rodgers and Hart or George and Ira Gershwin.
“That’s high praise, I very much appreciate that,” he says. “Those are the folks one has to compare oneself with when writing songs.
“In that style of writing they almost always divided the writing tasks between lyrics and music. I don’t myself do that but it’s an interesting way to do it because if you have a really strong lyricist together with a really strong composer you’ve got a very rich mixture and that’s part of what made those songs so great. That and dogged persistence: they got up every morning and clocked in to work and they just wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs.”
Wood also acknowledges the influence of rock-generation songwriters like James Taylor, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello and Sting.
“A good song is a good song and I think the best of their songs stand up to anything from the Great American Songbook,” he says. “I think they’re a continuation of it.”
On the album, his sixth, Wood sings with warmth and sensitivity, his arrangements are outstanding, with delicate string and brass writing, and his playing is soulful, on various keyboards.
He agrees that it represents a development from his earlier recordings: “Typically when you do a record you have a brief of one sort or another that you’re not always in complete agreement with but this record didn’t have that. It was just a collection of songs I had finished and felt good about so I felt at liberty to do it exactly the way I wanted. Maybe that’s a risk because you don’t know if it makes sense to have all these songs together or if they’re songs people will respond to. But in the end that doesn’t matter. In the end you just have to do it the way you think it ought to be done.”
The album received incredible reviews in British jazz, blues and roots music magazines but Wood sees it as being a slow burner. “CDs like mine have a long shelf life,” he argues. “They’re not disposable. If it’s 10 years after it’s released and you haven’t heard it, it should still work fine. It should still sound fresh and new, like a book you haven’t read.
“And I do care that people connect with it. I don’t want to be misunderstood or ignored for being too far out or too stylistically diverse. So if people like it I’ll feel very good about that and I’ll feel I’ve succeeded in communicating with them which is ultimately the goal.”
:: Charlie Wood plays in Bennigans Bar, City Of Derry Jazz And Big Band Festival, on Saturday April 30 (cityofderryjazzfestival.com).
PICK OF THE JAZZ FEST
There are soul bands and there are ska bands; there are blues bands and there are funk bands; there are tribute bands to the Drifters, Thin Lizzy and Jimi Hendrix and there is the Ulster Orchestra. And, yes, there are jazz bands: modern jazz bands, mainstream jazz bands, gypsy jazz bands, jazz big bands and bands led variously by pianists, saxophonists, trumpeters, drummers, guitarists and vocalists.
In fact, so vast is the variety and quality at this year’s Derry Jazz And Big Band Festival (April 28-May 2) that one is torn between collapsing in one’s room, overwhelmed by the difficulty of choosing which gigs to attend, and accepting one’s fate and hurtling headlong into five days of incessant, exhausting gig-going.
Highlights? Well, from England and Australia respectively, singer-pianists Liane Carroll and Janet Seidel are sublime interpreters of a lyric while trumpeter Byron Wallen, saxophonist Jean Toussaint and keyboard player Jason Rebello are among the most creative musicians on the contemporary British scene.
Local artists like drummer David Lyttle and saxophonist Gay McIntyre are also prominently featured – but hipsters will particularly relish the prospect of seeing, from America, vibraphonist Roy Ayers and singer-pianist Charlie Wood.
