Ernest Hood
Ernest Hood | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Ernest Hood |
| Born | 1923 North Carolina, U.S. |
| Origin | Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Died | March 1995 Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Genres | Ambient, jazz, field recording |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer, radio broadcaster, field recordist |
| Instruments | Guitar, zither, synthesizer, vibes |
| Years active | 1940s–1995 |
| Labels | Thistlefield Agency, Freedom to Spend |
Ernest Hood (1923 – March 1995) was an American musician, composer, field recordist, and radio broadcaster based in Portland, Oregon. Originally a jazz guitarist who performed with the Charlie Barnet Big Band in the mid-1940s, Hood contracted polio in the late 1940s and subsequently turned to the zither, early synthesizers, and field recording as his primary creative tools. He is best known for his self-released 1975 album Neighborhoods, a private-press LP combining zither and synthesizer compositions with field recordings of children, transportation, and suburban environments. Long obscure during his lifetime, the album was reissued in 2019 by Freedom to Spend Records to critical acclaim, retroactively establishing Hood as an early figure in ambient music.[1]
Early life
Hood was born in North Carolina in 1923 and moved with his family to Portland, Oregon, as a child. His mother, Ina Harrison Hood, sang on Portland radio station KOIN for roughly twenty years beginning in the late 1920s. Hood credited his earliest musical experience to a family ensemble in which he played guitar alongside his mother on piano and his brother Bill on saxophone. He attended Lincoln High School, where he began performing with local groups.[1]
Hood later recalled that his attachment to Oregon dated to 1925, when his father carried him along the logging-railroad tracks to Breitenbush Mineral Springs Resort, which his father co-operated with a partner named Merle Bruckman. Among his childhood acquaintances was the World War I aviator Tex Rankin.[1]
Performance career
In 1945, Hood was hired on the spot to play guitar with the touring Charlie Barnet Big Band after sitting in with the group during an appearance at Jantzen Beach in Portland. He toured widely across the United States with the band, performing in venues including the Apollo Theater in Harlem, which he later cited as a personal highlight. During this period he also performed with saxophonist Lucky Thompson.[1]
Polio and recovery
Hood was stricken with polio in the late 1940s (variously cited as 1946 or 1948) and spent a period in an iron lung. The illness ended his career as a touring guitarist and left him with permanent mobility limitations; he initially walked with the aid of canes and later used a wheelchair. Rather than abandon music, he learned to play other instruments suited to his physical condition, most notably the zither.[1]
Other pursuits (1950s–1960s)
After regaining mobility, Hood returned to Portland to study orchestration. He went on to arrange music for the Oregon Symphony's pops concerts and the Britt Music Festival in Jacksonville, Oregon. During the 1950s he lived in Medford, where he led a band called The Zephyrs, composed music, and wrote and directed local television programming. He also took up painting, drawing inspiration from the rural architecture of southern Oregon.[1]
In 1959, Hood was appointed Jackson County coordinator for the Oregon Centennial, an experience he credited with sparking his lifelong interest in regional history.[1]
Jazz advocacy and television
In 1960, Hood helped establish Portland's first jazz club, The Way Out, located beneath the Hawthorne Bridge; the venue's nightly performances were broadcast live on radio station KWJJ. In 1961 he appeared on a live KGW-TV program hosted by Northwest abstract painter Louis Bunce, which combined action painting with live jazz performance by the Jim Smith Nonette. The broadcast included an early documented instance of Hood discussing the integration of nature recordings with musical arrangement.[1]
KBOO and radio work
Hood was associated with Portland community radio station KBOO from its founding era in the late 1960s through the 1990s. According to Hood, the station's call letters originated as a Halloween joke during an early organizational meeting and were ultimately retained.[1]
Across the 1970s he produced a number of nostalgia-themed radio programs, variously titled Old Radio Hour, Radio Days, Radio Pictures, and Roadside Nostalgia Notes. The shows blended Hood's personal collection of big band recordings with original narration, field recordings, and music. For Old Radio Hour he printed a decoder card allowing listeners to decode a hidden message; the prize was a gold pencil bearing the inscription "Zither Music Is Best." A 1975 New Year's Day episode is regarded as a stylistic precursor to Neighborhoods.[1]
Hood also produced documentary audio tours of Oregon general stores, viewing them as vanishing examples of personal, character-driven commerce.[1]
Collaborations
In 1970, Hood collaborated with pop musician Herb Alpert on a single titled "Ollie", written and produced by Alpert; the B-side, "Sitka", was written by Hood. In 1974, Hood co-wrote the song "Mountain Train" with Brazilian jazz vocalist Flora Purim for her album Stories to Tell. Hood also contributed zither performances to Purim's first two studio albums.[1]
Thistlefield Agency
Hood operated a small home-based publishing imprint called Thistlefield Agency (or simply Thistlefield) from his residence in West Linn, Oregon. Through Thistlefield he distributed cassettes of his radio programs, which combined field recordings, music, and narration; tapes were historically distributed to homebound listeners through the Clackamas County Senior Council. Hood also printed greeting cards, calendars, and prints, and wrote books of poetry. By 1988 he was reportedly working on an autobiography.[1]
Neighborhoods (1975)
Neighborhoods was self-released on vinyl in 1975 as a private press, more often gifted than sold. The album combined Hood's compositions for multitracked zither and early Roland and Crumar synthesizers with layered field recordings of children at play, suburban ambiences from the early 1970s, and archival recordings of automobiles, steam trains, and AM radio big-band broadcasts. Hood described the work as "musical cinematography" intended for solitary or intimate listening rather than social settings.[1]
The original pressing quantity is unknown. The jacket included a mail-order appeal asking listeners to send $5.95 plus 50¢ postage; original copies have since traded for upwards of $400. Jad Bindeman of Freedom to Spend Records has characterized the album as accidentally ahead of its time, describing Hood's intent as personal expression rather than stylistic innovation.[1]
After decades of obscurity, the album circulated through online bulletin boards and unauthorized YouTube uploads before being reissued by Freedom to Spend in 2019, remastered from the original tapes. The reissue met with critical acclaim and commercial success, and is now widely cited as an early work in the ambient music tradition, predating Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) by three years.[1]
Recognition
In 1988, the Oregon Historical Society awarded Hood its Award of Merit in recognition of his work documenting Oregon through recorded sound. The society's then-executive director, Tom Vaughan, who had known Hood for three decades, noted that Hood had been engaged in audio preservation work long before it became fashionable.[1]
Death
In his sixties, Hood developed post-polio syndrome, which progressively weakened his musculature, including his arms and lungs. After a respiratory failure he was hospitalized at Oregon Health Sciences University, where he was intubated and subsequently underwent a tracheostomy that left him unable to speak. As his condition deteriorated and he lost the strength to write, he communicated by spelling words letter by letter on his palm.[2]
Following passage of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act by Oregon voters in 1994, Hood became one of the first patients in the state to invoke the law. He died at the hospital, in the presence of his family, in March 1995.[2][1]
Posthumous releases and legacy
Following the success of the 2019 reissue of Neighborhoods, Freedom to Spend released a posthumous collection, Back to the Woodlands, in 2022. The CD edition was bundled with an exclusive bonus album titled Where the Woods Begin, which included tracks drawn from Hood's archive, including "Train to Grass Creek", a piece bearing thematic resemblance to his earlier collaboration "Mountain Train" with Flora Purim.[1]
Hood is now widely regarded as a pioneering figure in ambient music, with Neighborhoods frequently grouped alongside earlier proto-ambient works such as Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby (1962), Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation (1964), Irv Teibel's Environments series (1969–1979), and Basil Kirchin's Worlds Within Worlds (1971).[1]
Personal life
Hood had a daughter named Laurel. He lived for many years in West Linn, Oregon, where he maintained a home printing room used for his Thistlefield Agency projects.[1]
Discography
Studio albums
- Neighborhoods (Thistlefield, 1975; reissued by Freedom to Spend, 2019)
- Back to the Woodlands (Freedom to Spend, 2022, posthumous)
- Where the Woods Begin (Freedom to Spend, 2022, posthumous; CD-exclusive bonus album)
Selected singles and contributions
- "Ollie" / "Sitka" (with Herb Alpert, 1970)
- "Mountain Train" (co-written with Flora Purim, from Stories to Tell, 1974)
References
External links
- "Ernest Hood: A Short Biography" by Chad Crouch
- KBOO archival recording (1973): Ernie Hood, Homer Clark and Garth Miller talk about jazz music
- Radio Pictures/Radio Days (1975) – KBOO archive
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