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Calling his swinging style "rock-a-boogie," pianist Mitch Woods & His Rocket 88’s have helped revive the jump-blues sound of the 1940s and '50s. Woods has been called "one of the finest boogie-woogie, jump-blues and second-line pianists" of this generation who also has a healthy admiration for the blues giants of the past. Born in Brooklyn, New York, April 3, 1951, Mitch Woods first became exposed to music as a child when he would hear piano notes drifting across the street from a nearby mansion into his mother’s apartment. Unlike many other children, he actually "wanted" piano lessons and once started, showed an immediate aptitude. By the age of eleven, disenchanted with his classical-based lessons, he longed for the musical freedom he heard in jazz and blues. By his teens, during the turbulent 1960’s, he was playing clubs in Greenwich Village, taking jazz courses at the University of Buffalo, listening to Otis Spann and Champion Jack Dupree and developing a unique, driving piano style of his own. After moving to San Francisco in the early 1970’s he discovered the jump-blues of Louis Jordan and quickly became an ardent convert, forming a new band in 1980, The Rocket 88’s. Woods, an acknowledged master of four distinct styles of piano, Chicago blues, Kansas City boogie-woogie, West Coast jump-blues and the polyrhythmic accents of New Orleans, got the opportunity to play with some of his musical heroes when he recorded his 1996 Viceroy album "Keeper Of The Flame." When Mitch Woods takes the stage, bring along a fire extinguisher, because when he starts wailing away on the piano he's liable to set the place on fire.
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