Elijah Wood’s lord of the turntables
Actor brings his duo and DJ skills to S. Florida.
Last month inside the unfinished Brickell City Center in Miami, funk-electronica duo Wooden Wisdom performed a DJ set for a Miami Art Week party. At first, no one seemed to recognize the celebrity half of the group, Elijah Wood, best known for playing Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies, flipping records onstage in his gray fedora. After a few songs, Wood recalls, concertgoers rushed the stage to snap selfies with him, prompting security to install barricades nearby.
“I kind of look at it as a great sneak attack,” Wood says of the duo’s sets, speaking from his Los Angeles home on a conference line with DJ-producer Zach Cowie. “People can come to the event with their preconceived notions of their familiarity with me, but all that disappears when the lights turn off and they hear the music.”
Wood and Cowie, back in Miami to spread their Wooden Wisdom on Thursday at Bardot nightclub, prefer to let their act dwell in anonymity. When the pair started their vinyl-spinning bromance in 2011, at a party for the designer fashion label Rodarte, Wood and Cowie bonded over their interest in “strange and esoteric” disco-funk and jazz records.
Performances came together with minimal effort. After a handful of sets booked by the Irish Whiskey brand Bushmills, the duo picked a name for what they call their “professional hobby.” Wooden Wisdom is a combination of Elijah’s surname and Cowie’s former DJ name (Turquoise Wisdom). They began touring in January 2015.
“The name took no thought whatsoever,” Cowie says with a laugh. “We were both struck by each other’s musical curiosities. I think we’re just adventurers in sound. Elijah is still acting, producing, and I’m still DJ’ing apart from Wooden Wisdom. The band is always on the side, but still important to us.”
Wood’s fascination with DJ’ing started long before his kinship with Cowie. While filming “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy in New Zealand, he says he “carried around giant Case Logics filled with CDs,” and discovered a CD mixer at a Wellington bar with fellow actor Dominic Monaghan (“Lost”).
Wood migrated to obscure vinyl records, attracted by the “physicality” and “pureness” of the music form. In recent years, the duo’s musical sensibilities have leaned toward disco, African boogie, gospel and, Wood says, “ambient electronic Japanese music of the 1970s and ’80s.”
Asked to recite what has appeared in Wooden Wisdom’s recent set lists, Wood says, “Well, I’ve got the Clark Sisters’ ‘You Brought the Sunshine.’ There’s this African group who released this record called ‘Chicken Chicken,’ and the album cover is a photo of the band eating chicken sandwiches. I love this series called ‘Voodoo Funk.’ They release disco and boogie from South Africa.”
“We really do collect everything,” says Cowie, whose is music supervisor for the Aziz Ansari Netflix series “Master of None.” “There really are no rules, and there are no specific genres that we hold on to.”
Wooden Wisdom will perform 10 p.m. Thursda at Bardot, 3456 N. Miami Ave., in Miami. Admission costs $22. Call 305-576-7750 or go to BardotMiami.com