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King Johnson rides with spirit of By Daniel Goldberg STAFF WRITER dgoldber@greenvillenews.com They say it's better to be lucky than good, but it's better still to be lucky AND good. It would be unfair to credit simple luck with creating the lively spontaneity of "Luck So Strange," the third album of Atlanta brassy blues band King Johnson. But according to guitarist and vocalist Oliver Wood, a fortunate chord here and there might have had something to do with it.
"Our process for rehearsing and especially writing is to just play in a free-form way," Wood says. "Usually music comes first, but sometimes one of us will have part of a song written and someone will say, 'Hey, let's try that thing we jammed on last week.'" Fateful improvisation aside, resumes within the 6-year-old quintet suggest years of impressive gigging is most likely responsible for the distinctive New-Orleans-horn-funk-meets-Chicago-electric-blues sound that shows up on "Luck So Strange." Prior to forming King Johnson, Wood toured with acclaimed Atlanta bluesman Tinsley Ellis. Founding bassist Chris Long has written songs for Grammy-winning blues-rocker Delbert McClinton, while drummer Greg Baba is well-versed in the New Orleans sound that brings so much flavor to the group's jams. Trombone and tuba player Adam Mewherter — who teams with saxophone and clarinet player Marcus James to mine King Johnson's jazz influences — has played with Ray Charles, Don Henley and Al Jarreau. "My dad was definitely my main influence," Wood says. "My father was a great guitar player and singer, and he was really into the folk scene of the '50s and '60s." Introduced early to musicians such as Lightning Hopkins and Sonny Terry — and later Jimi Hendrix and the British blues invasion — Wood would jam around the house with his younger brother Chris, now the bassist in acclaimed improvisational jazz-fusion trio Medeski, Martin and Wood. The brothers took a lasting ideal from those youthful influences: "There were no stop signs." That musical daring has followed Wood into his adult career. King Johnson was originally conceived as a three-piece blues outfit — the band's name is a nod to the many masters of that genre with the surnames King (B.B., Albert, Freddie) and Johnson (Robert, Blind Willie, Luther) — adding Mewherter and James in 1998 to stir up the musical gumbo. "The horns open up so many doors," Wood says. "A lot of Chicago and Delta blues, you don't think of horns. On the other hand, when you think of the New Orleans sound, those musicians featured a lot of horns. I think that's more along the lines of what we're doing, very loose and free in that way." |
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