Album Notes

Every scene has its up and coming instrumental groups, and most local scenes are blessed with a handful of great players. Columbus, Ohio is no exception and has upheld an unconscious lineage of world-class musicians wood-shedding in the Midwest over the years. But few are the locally emerging great writers: bona fide composers. And fewer still are the young writers with years of terrain still stretched out before them…. Enter Stephen Wood and his intronautical group, Postal. And with Postal, I would like to reintroduce a few formerly familiar characters: A pair of Martians – the Hammond Organ and the Fender Rhodes. A bowl of drunken monkeys – the Horn Section. A large piece of sexy wood resembling a tree in drag – the Stand-Up Bass. An in-the-pocket maze of wire known as the Electric Guitar. And a classic American groove machine called the Drum Kit. A reminiscent outfit to be sure, but this the New World, and this is not the time, nor the place, for derivative concoctions. Hippies beware, and warier still be ye swingsters and fusionites. Postal is here to rescue us from the madness of anachronism, nostalgia, and futurism. Unlike most Hammond-keyed orchestras, Postal is neither an evangelical Big Top Circus front, nor a regurgitation of sixties blues and free swing, lovely as they both may be. Welcome to the analog literature of the millennium. Drawing on the eccentric fringes of early seventies jazz and the informants of contemporary composition, Stephen Wood infiltrates archetype with a quest for a voice all his own. Combining the psychedelic super-structure of Bitches Brew with the erotically intellectual discipline of Mingus, the pulsating root of Stax merging with post-modern playfulness of Medeski – Steve Wood lays his pool of keys out like a Patagonian lake, always an aspect of the total landscape, imbedding his riffs and grooves in the narrative of his compositions and not the other way around. It’s a picture he’s after, and a story of the images we receive, sonically. Wood carries a restrained, meditative fever to the helm while the Postal players imbibe his modes and structures with all the color, fury and improvisational humor necessary to tell the tale. On some fronts the creative seas are wide open; on others, the sidewalks have all but hemmed us in. These tunes may be fresh out of the chute, but Postal is aimed straight ahead, eager for poignant language and the experience of a new frontier. Look Out!