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...from AUDIOreview /October 1999
Often it's said that modern "pop" music is exhausted of creativity and that it's nearly impossible "to invent" anything original in its context. Perhaps because of this, many artists go to great lengths to compose within a pre-set groove, forgetting the more intimate and deep reasons they originally desired to create and to communicate in the first place. What's immediately striking about Illustrated Night is that Eric Wood does not suffer from this disease. His music is borne out of a requirement he's been unable to avoid or suppress for the nearly thirty years since he first debuted in coffee-houses until the release of his first disc in 1997.
In a world often dominated by the futile and stupid desire for eternal youth at any ridiculous cost, the music of this singer-songwriter is an oasis of beauty and poetry. And if the arrival of Letters From The Earth unexpectedly established Wood in the company of Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, Illustrated Night is the splendid confirmation of what we have not hesitated and we do not hesitate to define as one of the most important contemporary American singer-songwriters. Equipped with a wonderful voice of extraordinary clarity, Eric Wood accompanies it with a most personal and effective acoustic guitar style. And as though this wasn't enough, he arranges his songs with the taste and urgency that only a transparently clear musical vision can create. The contra-bass, drums, piano and vibraphone enrich the harmonic and rhythmic webbing of these songs, emphasizing the elegant and refined jazz atmosphere. Though this album needs no famous names, it also perfectly features the beautiful voice of our Cristina Donà, movingly enriching the rarefied atmosphere that Eric Wood creates with the infinite class of a true master. Giancarlo Susanna
Genre: Folk jazz
Artistic quality: 9
Technical quality: 8
...from Rock Star /December 1999
The return of the melancholy New York taxi driver.
For two anxious years since Eric Wood made Letters From The Earth, I repeatedly listened to its musical lyricism without interruption. With melancholic songs, both beautiful and terrible, [Illustrated Night] is the return of an unbridled and never to be defeated songwriter who has after all again found his way. Reflecting on the lost love for a world that for years it has covered, it explores the margins like the driver of a taxi that crosses the Big Apple. If Tim Buckley's Blue Afternoon had attended the same territories of jazz and of South American music, it probably would have sounded similar to Eric Wood's second CD. The comparison [to Buckley] has often been made and it is repeated now, but the test of this album is that Wood has become somewhat detached from this important but limiting comparison in order to take risks in other musical territories of grand class. This would seem to have little to do with the absolutely original and heavy lyrics that can have a huge emotional impact on the listener. Also, if I don't listen immediately, the same feeling of perfection forms these song that Letters From The Earth had left in the ear (and, even more in the heart) of this particular listener.
Other than a series of concerts in ' '97 that rendered him a cult here in Italy, Mr. Wood has kept a low profile. The more careful listener will notice in this recording, the discreet presence of the charming voice of our Cristina Dona, on the choruses of three of the ten songs of which the album one is made up. Chiara Papaccio 8/10
Also listen to:
*Modern Jazz Quartet The MJQ at Music Inn (1956)
*the vibraphone of Milt Jackson
*Tim Buckley Happy Sad (1969) -
Reference #1 for intimate inspiration.
...from Sound / October 1999
Eric Wood
Illustrated Night
Appaloosa AP 136
This disc is suited in the colors of nocturnal atmospheres. However fascinating and passionate, it's loaded with intensely fast-passing scents and is simultaneously frightening and friendly. The new CD of Eric Wood appears constructed with class and refinement; with seductive, moving, round, dark and tentative sounds. Illustrated Night offers an intimate and similarly lit window into the nocturnal hours as one normally does into daylight hours. After the applauded Letters From the Earth, here is another small pearl that's been borne into a larger and often barren musical world that's usually more miserly with its talents. Gleaned from an improvisational session at B&b Studios in Ferrara on the occasion of a television show, Wood unconsciously created this new disc. It was eventually signed to a new label and saw the light of day thanks also to the vocal collaboration of Cristina Dona' on three of the songs, The Call, Bury Me Standing and Fade Into Love. The movement of Wood's composition between blues, folk and jazz in songs like Let My People Go and Fools Gold, is fruit also of the facilitates executed by T. Xiques on drums, Jeff Berman (vibrafono), Carl de Rose (bass) and Luis Perdomo (piano). Having been turned into a CD, this classic accidental-disc is successfully astounding. A.s.
...from Blow Up -September 1999
Eric Wood /Illustrated Night /Appaloosa
Life begins after forty years? For Eric Wood, an American with many ties our beautiful country (this second album is on an Italian label and hosts Cristina Dona'), [Illustrated Night] is evidence of a nearly legendary, adventurous life that included being a child in Haight-Ashbury and a later loss of memory from the consequences of an automobile accident. Song writing was his remedy for his memory deficits through which he captured ideas and emotions that would have otherwise escaped him, like the tears in the rain of the Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. The quality of [Wood's] writing leaves one dumbfound that two decades have passed before the world has acknowledged him. Still in mourning (we will not always be) since the departure of Jeff Buckley ...or still in love with Tim? The ten songs that parade through Illustrated Night will be as many blows of lightning. Notwithstanding the vocal similarities, these songs are similarly evocative in intensity and atmosphere although lacking some of the drama of the two Buckleys. Nevertheless, comparisons can be made to the Was or the Last Goodbye. And once you've become acquainted, you'll never renounce to squandering the bossanova of Let My People Go, the jazz leanings of The Call, or the rhythmic Steampipes ...or the sweet melodies of Fade Into Love and Crazy Jane. (7/8) (Eddy Cilia)
...from Buscadero / September 1999
Eric Wood Illustrated Night (Appaloosa Records / IRD) (four stars ****)
The 1997 Letters From The Earth debut album of Eric Wood was one of the more satisfying offerings of the musical panorama. Nevertheless the road taken by that troubadour of the folk city since that last CD is still climbing. His career went from the coffeehouses of Ohio, to Nashville in the`70s -before coming to the bars of the East village of New York. There, Eric played with numerous well-known jazz session players and later accompanied musicians like Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin and Richard Thompson on American tours that garnered public and journalistic acclaim.
The general public finally got it with the Tangible Records release of his first and most intense album. It revealed the experiences that matured Wood in the course of those years, exposing a sensitive, poetic and sincere mind and revealing an optimal songwriter. A spontaneous comparison to the voice of Tim Buckley of Blue Afternoon, the first Tom Waits, Dylan and the Van Morrison of Astral Weeks arises when listening to Letters From The Earth. It's a brilliant concoction of melancholy folk, jazz, blues and Latin rhythms wrapped around a poetic, detached inner search. A nocturnal atmosphere fuses together this personal and intriguingly introspective album and increases the mystery of Eric Wood. And in person, he's just like the artist, at once incarnating a fascinatingly dark, mysterious hermit and precisely the type of person you'd expect to meet after hearing him in the smoky atmospheres of his songs. Now, on the Appaloosa Records label, Illustrated Night sounds even more ethereal. There is no longer the scratching notes of Endless Highway wherein Wood sang, "...Guess I'm like the devil, no tomorrow for me". This new jazz combo overflows with sensuality and although still intriguingly introspective, it's more confidential and the smoky songs incarnate the spirit of jazz in its most intimate form. The rhythms are even more seductive and fragile. In Let My People Go Wood sings, "Deliver me from good and the evil -Let my people go" and we're suspended with him in this intermediate state. The songs of this musician from the Appalachian hills are often arranged over the fundamental Latin rhythms of his acoustic guitar (Blue Impression, Opus To Ecstasy and the wonderful Crazy Jane) while the combo enriches the mix. The vibraphone dances with Wood's fragile and breathy vocals. Bury Me Standing is Wood's most personal folk ballad reminiscent of Eric Andersen. We imagine ourselves in an after-hours, fifties, jazz club with exotic shadings... where everything's cool yet splendidly decadent. Although these words sound contradictory, they accurately reassume the world of Eric Wood. Warm, jazz ideas of a vintage year "illustrate the night" but are refreshed with a cocktail as soon as they're expressed. Illustrated Night courageously travels between fermented "sounds and visions" for you to explore. -Sara Rovera
...from Musica / September 1999
Eric Wood Illustrated Night / Appaloosa
Strange history, that of Eric Wood. And in the passing of years, it has included the most beautiful names of the jazz and the folk scene. Although with time, it promises to blossom, success only began to come with the recording of an album two years ago in the United States. When it finally arrived here, a cult following was soon created. It's not surprising then that this new disc comes published from an Italian label and that the voice of Cristina Dona' on the choruses of three songs testifies to the special feeling between Wood and Italy. Illustrated Night does not have the magic of the debut, that fantastic buckleyesque humor that permeated its expressions and atmospheres, but it communicates a beautiful elegant air, with the measured sounds of a quintet where the guitar converses with piano and vibraphone in sophisticated folk-rock mixed with adventurous jazz. It's as easy to read as the pages of the young Tim Hardin or Tim Buckley and alternates from torment to sentimentality to frivolity. Perhaps the pages are the better read by firelight in the dark. Suggested: Second Chance, Bury Me Standing. Riccardo Bertoncelli
From Heap (Muccio) / August-September ' 99
Blue impressions
Eric Wood Illustrated Night Appaloosa - Ird
Two years have passed since this publication first introduced Eric Wood before any other, thanks to the fortunate intuition of a journalist who doesn't just mirror what the others are writing about.
Strange case that Letters From the Earth atypically penetrated the mindset of those writers who usually only tow the line that the industry and foreign journalists throw out to them. But every now and then, an American musician who's not filling Yankee pockets reaches our ears.
Two years after, we're still admiring and assessing the record of an artist with such extraordinarily gifted talents. Two years have passed and finally we have in our hands his new disc with a dark, nocturnal title dense with the feeling of twilight: Illustrated Night.
Ten songs enter under the skin, leave the senses harmonious and fill to overflowing an album so permeated with physical desire and spiritual longing. Tim and Jeff Buckley, Fred Neil, Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell, Tim Hardin and David Crosby are all very special artists for Eric Wood to be compared to. And that's enough to make it his work appealing. But undoubtedly Illustrated Night definitively establishes Eric Wood in his own shoes.
Blessed with a jazz voice that sings from within the heart of sadness yet can expresses composite states of mind and accompanied by an elegant group of musicians, [Illustrated Night] plays a subtle game of mirrors and reflections. Along with those of Carol Lipnik and Kelly Flint on two songs, the voice of the singer Cristina Dona', is present on the three most beautiful songs of this collection.
The Call, Let My People Go, Opus To Ecstasy, Blue Impression, Second Chance, Bury Me Standing, Fade Into Love and the others all bring about a special feeling, one that's normally reserved for only precious things. The same deep feeling I have when I listen to Letters From The Earth is repeated here at the same levels. Cico Casartelli
performance review... Eric Wood 16 Decembers Zoo Bar /Turin
"... With only his guitar, Eric Wood generously gave greater depth to his musical poetry with an urgent, expressive voice in an emotion igniting performance that in recent years only Jeff Buckley had shown a club. Performed in their original and elementary shape, songs from Illustrated Night were even more intense and inspiring and unveiled an even more extraordinary, important writer and singer than his CD already reveals." Bussolino Helium -Musica /Milan Italy January 2000
...from Jam -September 1999
Eric Wood by Paulo Vites
After the surprizing Letter From The Earth, the New York hermit song writer (who some compare to Tim Buckley) returns with a new CD that has more connections with Italy. "Illustrated Night," Wood tells; "was recorded in 3 hours one afternoon in Ferrara during a pause in the band's tour. I originally intended it to be a demo but after some friends heard it and enthusiastically convinced me that it was worth working on it to make it an actual CD. When we returned to New York, and listened to what we'd recorded there, the idea came that here perhaps we already have the recording for the deal offered me by the Italian label (Appaloosa /IRD). Once back in New York, I overdubbed the exceptional jazz piano player who usually plays with us but couldn't make the tour." "Illustrated Night is more complex and above all even more a jazz record than the previous record and communicates strong South American accents. "Letters From The Earth" also had those influences, but perhaps this one has even more. However, this is mostly because the jazz players here are more Latin oriented. The drummer is the son of a well known Cuban musician and the pianist is Venezuelan and this maybe this blood lends to the South American sound you've perceived."
But Wood's Italian connection are also perceptible here in the background vocals of the exceptional singer, Cristina Dona'. "We sang on stage once together and I realized she harmonized in perfect way and insisted she sing on my disc." The voice of Eric in this new collection of songs has more of the same rich and complex shadings like we already knew: "I think of my voice like an instrument. I might hear a saxophone solo for instance, and then try to repeat it vocally, which may not be the traditional way of singing of course." That's more the way someone like Joni Mitchell sings recent jobs. I adore Joni. And have learned a lot from listening to her since the late sixties." The songs of Illustrated Night are nocturnal songs, like apt title of the disc indicates. "I take inspiration from any thing, from any place, in any unexpected moment. Some songs come when I find some old cassette where I'd started working on song a long time ago and had forgotten. Crazy Jane was inspired by a Yeats poem. Let My People Go addresses those who want to impose their religious constraints on others. I have my own 'spiritual convictions' but believe that people must be free to go where they want in this regard."