Ernest Hood

Based in Portland, Oregon, Ernest Hood worked as a guitarist, zither player, and field recorder. Although his early experience included jazz and performances with big bands throughout the 1940s, his reputation rests almost entirely on a single solo project: the 1975 album Neighborhoods. That privately issued record assembled a reflective, wistful patchwork of buoyant synthesizer compositions threaded with field recordings of ordinary small-town moments. The album remained largely unknown while Hood was alive, yet it attracted a devoted audience nearly fifty years afterward and received a 2019 reissue.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1923 and often billed simply as Ernie, Hood performed guitar alongside his brother Bill Hood and with saxophonist and bandleader Charlie Barnet during the 1940s. In the early 1950s he contracted polio, which confined him to an iron lung for a year and left him reliant on a wheelchair and crutches thereafter. Unable to continue on guitar, he turned to the zither and began documenting daily sounds on a wire recorder—children playing after school or purchasing candy at the corner store among them. He helped establish the Portland community radio station KBOO and later wove these “audio postcards” into his broadcasts. During the 1970s he issued the dreamy instrumental single “Ollie” on A&M Records in 1970 and appeared on recordings by Brazilian jazz singer Flora Purim. In 1975 he released the privately pressed LP Neighborhoods, which combined selections from his field-recording archive with synthesizer melodies and gentle zithers. The record found few listeners at the time, and Hood produced no further albums before his death in 1991.

Neighborhoods resurfaced in the early twenty-first century through music blogs, YouTube, and other platforms dedicated to overlooked recordings. Pitchfork placed the album on its 2016 list of the Top 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Freedom to Spend, a sublabel of RVNG Intl. overseen by Pete Swanson and Jed Bindeman, reissued the album in 2019, directing a share of the proceeds to KBOO.