music
Duncan Wood is a physicist and amateur engineer (and all around polymath) turned singer-songwriter-producer. He grew up in rural Maysville, Kentucky, a small town on the banks of the Ohio River. His family encouraged him to pursue his passion for music from a young age, and without professional instruction gained working proficiency on guitar, piano, and a large variety of wind instruments. Starting in middle school, he would jump back and forth among playing in his grandfather’s big band (where he was one of the youngest members by several decades), the school concert band, and various local rock bands. His musical influences are . . . eclectic, but the earliest and most central include the great songwriters James Taylor, Carole King, Lennon and McCartney.
After high school, he moved to California to attend Stanford University and pursue his dream of becoming a physicist. There, he was exposed to real, live, improvised jazz while befriending and performing with world-class young musicians, including bassist Zach Moses and guitarist Aris Kare. He returned to his Kentucky roots when he began performing with these talented jazz artists in the Bay Area–hearkening back to his time playing trumpet in Woody Wood’s Big Band.
Unless otherwise noted, Duncan’s music is uniquely Duncan’s. He generally plays all of the instruments and does all of the engineering for each of his tracks. He recorded and engineered his debut album from the library in a nineteenth-century home on the banks of the Ohio River in Ripley, Ohio (a space he has dubbed “Red Carpet Records” thanks to the interior decorating trends in the 1970s). He has even modified, redesigned, or tinkered with most of his instruments and amplifiers to customize them to his various needs. In his spare time, he enjoys measuring the observable universe and tearing apart and rebuilding old electronics.
- Chanslor Gallenstein
