Thursday, December 13, 2007 (SF Chronicle)
NIGHTLIFE/Mitch Woods Whether playing solo or with his bands, Bay Area
pianist rockets to New Orleans and back, then around the world
Derk Richardson


Mitch Woods is cruising. His boogie-woogie chops regularly propel
the Bay
Area pianist-singer to France, Switzerland and Spain. He gets suits
custom-fitted in Hong Kong at Sam's Tailor, whose clients have included
James Brown and Bill Clinton. And next month, after a bunch of hometown
gigs, Woods sets sail on the Legendary Blues Cruise through the eastern
Caribbean.
"That's my life," Woods said with a jet-lagged laugh the day after he
returned from a jaunt through Thailand. "I'm home a month, then gone a
month." The Legendary Blues Cruise, which also sails out of San Diego in
October, is especially fun for Woods; he hosts the after-hours Mitch
Woods Club 88 piano bar. "It's the late, late, late show," he said, and such
cruise stars as Taj Mahal, Hubert Sumlin and Charlie Musselwhite sit in on
the spontaneous till-dawn sessions.
Classically trained on piano growing up in Brooklyn, Woods started
navigating his course into roots music about 38 years ago, jamming in
clubs around the State University of New York at Buffalo. "I was just
naturally playing the blues, but people would comment that I sounded like
the old boogie-woogie guys," Wood recalled. "So I started asking around
about those guys, and I started buying up all the records I could find by
Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons and Champion Jack Dupree. I really fell
in love with it." When he migrated to California in 1971, people told Woods he
reminded them of Louis Jordan, of "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" fame. "So I
went out and got all the Louis Jordan albums I could find. He wrote great
lyrics, he was a great entertainer - he was a big inspiration."
As he widened his performing circle to shows and festivals outside the Bay
Area, Woods met and played with such giants as John Lee Hooker, James
Cotton, Johnnie Johnson, Earl King and Lee Allen (who all joined him on
his all-star 1996 CD, "Keeper of the Flame"). One of the biggest turning
points came in 1981, on Woods' first trip to New Orleans, when he got
to open for the storied pianist James Booker at the Maple Leaf. "After
that, forget it," Woods said. "For the last 25 years it's been like my second
home." In 2006, Woods released his "Big Easy Boogie" CD, featuring members
of rock 'n' roll pioneer Fats Domino's bands, including saxophonist Herb
Hardesty, drummer Earl Palmer and producer Dave Bartholomew. Now he
performs his trademark "rock-a-boogie" sound solo, with his Rocket 88s
and with his Big Easy Boogie band, always serving as a booster for Crescent
City culture. "Half the city is still destroyed, and a lot of musicians
have left," he acknowledged of post-Katrina New Orleans. "It's a
tragedy. But the clubs and restaurants are all open, and the people there are
determined to bring it back. I always tell people to go - you'll have a
great time." Woods knows that subject as well as anyone.

- Derk Richardson, 96Hours@sfchronicle.com
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Copyright 2007 SF Chronicle

"Woods rocks the joint with some of the jumpin 'est piano we've heard.

"Mitch Woods...give heart and soul to jump blues... Woods sings with smooth ebullience

and hammers the piano keys with the unchecked gaiety of mentors Professor Longhair and Amos Milburn."

-- Frank-John Hadley, Downbeat

"Piano master Mitch Woods [is one of the brightest exponents of West Coast swing,

Kansas City boogie-woogie, and Chicago blues. Woods also has a fine touch for

New Orleans' piano polyrhythms."

 --Scott Jordan, Offbeat

"1t's not east to play that Professor Longhair piano lick - those rippling rumba triplets

in the right hand against a driving, eight-to-the-bar boogie in the left - but San Francisco's Mitch Woods plays it as well as anyone outside New Orleans ever has... This may be  complicated music to play, but it's very easy music to hear. There's something about the syncopated bounce of boogie-woogie that lifts one's spirits even as it shifts one's shoulders and hips."

 --Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post

"Few pianists around have better captured the definitive boogie-blues, eight-to-the-bar

styles of Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Otis Spann, Meade Lux Lewis...and all the rest -

Woods is one of them"

 --Philip Elwood, SF Examiner

"One of the top boogie/blues piano men around..." Dan Aquilante, NY Post 

"...As a keeper of the flame, Woods has always been able to blast headlong through

the inferno on the strength of his dazzling boogie-woogie chops.

-- Derk Richardson, SF Bav Guardian

" 'Keeper Of The Flame  has to be one of the most uplifting recordings to have vibrated

my woofers in a long time...it's like witnessing one of those breathtaking moments of music where the unspoken communication and the resulting musical dialogue can raise a goose bump or two. .It has the power to charm and to entertain the power to inspire and to motivate. ...Definitely do not miss out."  Maureen DelGrosso, Blues Revue

"If it takes 88 keys to open the door to your heart, then pianist Mitch Woods ought to be your doorman"

 --Bill Kisliuk, Southland Blues