Wild Wood

For more than a decade now, Medeski Martin & Wood hasn’t given two craps about genre boundaries. Hard-pressed, the trio’s sound could be called progressive jazz, but each of its albums has been a drastic departure from the previous release. Nonetheless, questions still remain for this organ-drums-and-bass combo about the definitions of jazz, so-called jam-band music, and how (and whether) music should be categorized.

“I remember back in the earlier days, in the earlier ’90s, all of a sudden people were calling us acid jazz,” says bassist Chris Wood with a chuckle, “because that happened to be this name that described this music that — maybe vaguely — resembled what we did. But it didn’t feel like jazz to us, like improvisation…. And then the jam-band scene came along and people went, ‘Oh, that’s what they are, a jam band.’ But ‘jam band’ is not describing music. It’s describing the audience. And that just happens to be one of the audiences we attract, for whatever reason.”

That reason might be that — say what you will about the annoying stereotypes (and there are many) — Deadhead descendents have led the pack in terms of openness to new things. One look at recent festival lineups, such as Bonnaroo and Moedown, shows that jam-band fans have embraced jazz in a big way — and they don’t care whether something they’re hearing constitutes “real” jazz. This relationship goes back all the way to Miles Davis’ appearance at 1970’s fabled Isle of Wight rock festival. His adventurous 1969 album, Bitches Brew, which acerbic jazz critic Stanley Crouch called “the biggest self-violation in the history of music,” sold more copies than any jazz album before it — thanks largely, of course, to a bunch of acid-eating college kids and psychedelic-rock fans.

Meanwhile, as recently as last year, Jazz Times writers hotly debated the “validity” of the Bad Plus, a trio that plays fairly conventional jazz but intentionally evokes the energy of rock. Did MMW, when it debuted in the early ’90s, elicit a similar consternation from the jazz establishment?

“Probably in a different way,” Wood answers. “But all those conversations are ridiculous. People just play music. My whole problem with the word jazz is, it’s become so meaningless…. You kind of have to find new words or get more specific or just talk about individuals…. That’s why we picked a band name like we did. It’s a stupid name, but that’s the most honest name we could come up with.”