Medeski, Martin & Wood

Medeski, Martin & Wood have carved out a singular position by moving fluidly between avant-garde improvisation and groove-centered jazz, establishing themselves at once as daring experimentalists and a widely embraced ensemble. The trio surfaced from Manhattan’s downtown milieu at the start of the 1990s and promptly embarked on nonstop national tours, later returning to the city to sharpen their approach via a wide range of influential sonic explorations. Keyboardist John Medeski, drummer and percussionist Billy Martin, and bassist Chris Wood had already intersected repeatedly during the 1980s in projects alongside John Lurie, John Zorn, and Martin’s mentor Bob Moses. The three musicians formally assembled in 1991 for a run of shows at New York’s Village Gate. They soon began rehearsing in Martin’s loft, composing material, and capturing 1992’s independently issued Notes from the Underground. Once they started touring beyond the protective yet confined New York scene, former child prodigy Medeski replaced his grand piano with a Hammond B-3 organ.

Gramavision issued It’s a Jungle in Here in 1993, featuring horn charts by future Sex Mob founder and ubiquitous scene figure Steven Bernstein. The medley pairing Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” with Bob Marley’s “Lively Up Yourself” encapsulated the band’s dual ambitions. Friday Afternoon in the Universe, often viewed as their breakthrough album, intensified the shift toward groove-driven accessibility, a direction that reached its height on the 1996 Rykodisc debut Shack-Man, tracked entirely inside the group’s practice shack deep in the Maui jungle. By 1996, relentless roadwork plus two widely bootlegged live collaborations with Phish had drawn the trio into the expanding jam-band circuit, where the majority of their following outside New York has remained concentrated.

Late that same year the musicians began a visible reconnection with their avant-garde origins by staging weekly “shack parties” at New York’s Knitting Factory that brought in guests such as Vernon Reid and DJ Logic, who soon became the group’s unofficial fourth member. In 1997 they released the freely improvised yet lyrical Farmer’s Reserve on their own Indirecto label, a set of Shack recordings. Logic joined them on the road, and the band prepared Combustication, their debut for Blue Note and first full-length project with producer Scott Harding. Two thousand saw MMW assert themselves as leaders with the live acoustic Tonic, captured at the New York club of the same name, and the electric The Dropper, cut at the newly named Shacklyn Studios in Brooklyn’s DUMBO district, alongside a celebrated Halloween concert at Manhattan’s Beacon Theater. The Dropper carried Harding’s raw production and featured Sun Ra alumnus Marshall Allen. In 2006 the trio issued Out Louder, documenting their collaboration with John Scofield, while their music appeared on Grey’s Anatomy.

Radiolarians I, the opening installment of three loosely connected albums, surfaced in fall 2008 on Indirecto Records. Radiolarians II and III arrived the following year, accompanied by the box set Radiolarians: The Evolutionary Set, which contained the full trilogy, a disc of remixes by noted DJs, a live CD, a double-LP selection drawn from the three studio albums, and Martin’s documentary DVD Fly in a Bottle. At this point, nearly two decades into their career, MMW’s stature had grown substantially.

The three core members continue to participate in numerous other recording projects both as sidemen and leaders. Their ascent also helped spark renewed interest in B-3 organ trios, and although other ensembles had previously performed with DJs, MMW’s work with DJ Logic rendered such pairings fashionable. Still regarded as an alternative jazz act, they regularly attract larger crowds than many mainstream peers. In 2011 Indirecto Records released MSMW Live: In Case the World Changes Its Mind, a double-length document drawn from the Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood 2006 world tour that included material from Scofield’s A Go Go and MSMW’s studio album Out Louder. The same year they issued 20, a collection of new compositions and previously unrecorded older pieces. In 2012 MMW put out Free Magic, a live recording from their 2007 acoustic tour. The members then focused on individual projects for a year. On 27 August 2013 at Applehead Studios in Woodstock, New York, before an audience of seventy-five ticket holders, the trio resumed its partnership with guitarist Nels Cline; the resulting Woodstock Sessions 2 appeared in April 2014.

Earlier that year they began tracking a third studio album with Scofield, an informal collection of original pieces inspired by Brazilian, Latin American, and Caribbean traditions together with covers of 1960s material. Juice was released in September 2014. The following February, Medeski, Martin & Wood merged their spontaneous yet groove-oriented approach with the twenty-one-piece neo-classical and improvising ensemble Alarm Will Sound for a performance at Denver’s Newman Center. A recording of that concert was issued in 2018 on digital and vinyl formats and reached number ten on the jazz charts.