The Kate: The Wood Brothers (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 30), after a dull and disappointing episode of the Caribbean-set policier Death in Paradise, my husband Charles and I watched an engaging set on the TV show The Kate featuring a three-person band called the Wood Brothers. The Kate is shot at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, and the Wood Brothers had an interesting backstory. Guitarist and lead singer Oliver Wood and bassist and harmonica player Chris Wood grew up together in Boulder, Colorado; their father, a molecular biologist by day and an amateur musician by night, was active in the 1960’s folk-music scene and music was very much a part of the family’s life. But when they grew up and moved out they separated and didn’t see each other for 15 years. Chris became a jazz bassist and co-founder of the band Medeski, Martin, and Wood, while Oliver hooked up with white blues singer/guitarist Tinsley Ellis and later, at Ellis’s suggestion, formed a band of his own called King Johnson. On May 24, 2001 King Johnson played a show in North Carolina as Medeski, Martin, and Wood’s opening act. Oliver sat in with his brother’s band and the two brothers decided they should be making music together. They recorded a demo of Oliver’s songs and in 2006 landed a contract with Blue Note Records, mostly a jazz label, though later they’d release on more rootsy labels like Southern Ground and Honey Jar. In their interstitial interviews they said they’ve changed their philosophy of recording so they do just one song at a time instead of thinking of full albums, and now that they have a studio at home they can take their time working on a song rather than having to worry about the clock ticking on expensive studio rentals.

The third member of the band, Jano Rix, is mostly a drummer, though he also played electric keyboard and melodica, a toy instrument consisting of a small keyboard and a mouthpiece. (Charles recalled seeing Stephen Colbert’s former musical director, Jon Batiste, playing melodica on his show, while I’d seen earlier videos from the 1960’s of Nat “King” Cole playing one during his live shows.) Rix said he, too, had grown up in a musical family; his father had been a major drummer whose high point was playing with Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue. He recalled his childhood as his dad playing drums for three hours, then him playing drums for three more hours, and then jamming. I was particularly struck by his ability to play keyboard with his right hand while maintaining a steady drum beat with his left hand and his feet. (Like organists, drummers play as much with their feet as they do with their arms.) Oliver writes most of their songs, and he’s proud of his elliptical lyrics – one aspect of their music that reminded me of the 1960’s folk-rock scene, along with Oliver’s Bob Dylan-like phrasing as a vocalist (though his voice doesn’t have the edgy quality of Dylan’s that led a lot of people to believe Dylan couldn’t sing at all), to the point where I said “folk-rock” when Charles asked me what genre of music the Wood Brothers belonged to. He thought they sounded more like modern country-rock than anything else. I wasn’t particularly impressed by their first four songs, “American Heartache,” “Postcards from Hell,” “Sparkling Wine,” and “Alabaster,” but for me their set kicked into high gear when they got to their fifth song, “Who the Devil.”

For the first seven songs Chris played acoustic bass – and played it quite well, reflecting his jazz heritage. During a segue between “Alabaster” and “Who the Devil” Chris inserted a drumstick between the strings of his bass and created an heavy vibrato whine effect that I would have sworn was electronically generated if I hadn’t seen that he was doing it all acoustically. “Who the Devil” also included one of OIiver’s best lines as a lyricist, “You gotta be lost to be found.” After “Who the Devil” they played “The Muse,” the title track from their 2013 Southern Ground album, and then they performed another particularly good song, “Keep Me Around.” That one featured Jano Rix playing “sluitar,” an odd instrument that looked like an acoustic guitar (albeit with one string missing) but wasn’t played like one; instead Rix beat it like a hand drum and the tambourine-like bells attached to it added to the sound’s appeal. Following that Chris shifted to electric bass, at first using the Hofner violin bass Paul McCartney played with The Beatles (Paul liked it because its body was symmetrical and therefore it looked right played left-handed, and I remembered seeing a local Beatles cover band called The Baja Bugs who recruited a left-handed bass player so they would look right standing together at one mike with the necks of their guitars pointing in opposite directions the way The Beatles did) – though it looked considerably more worn than Paul’s basses did – and then switching to a more normal-looking Fender bass. Their last three songs were “Shoofly Pie” (not the “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” novelty hit for Stan Kenton in the 1940’s that briefly got me interested in making apple pan dowdy), “Luckiest Man,” and “Happiness Jones,” the last of which proved that you can write a song about happiness without making it sound as banal and awful as Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” or Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” Overall The Wood Brothers turned in a remarkable performance with a sound that grew on me over time: a good-natured approach that was infectious and gave me, dare I say it, a happiness jones.