Phil Woods born November 2, 1931

Phil Woods (November 2, 1931 – September 29, 2015 was an American jazz alto saxophonist, clarinettist, bandleader, and composer.

Born Philip Wells Woods in Springfield, Massachusetts, Woods began playing the saxophone at the age of 12, and was at first an admirer of the swing altoists Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges. He had a few private lessons in his mid-teens with the pianist Lennie Tristano, the architect of a new jazz style that presented a more measured alternative to bebop’s full-on intensity, and subsequently came to be labelled the Cool School. But Woods was too visceral a performer to turn down the temperature on his sound, and he remained closer to the direct and explicitly communicative swing of a rootsier kind of jazz.

He studied music formally, first at the Manhattan School of Music, New York, from 1948, then at the Juilliard School, where he majored in clarinet, graduating in 1952 – an education that made him a popular sideman for his sight-reading skills. Woods preferred the two-sax front line adopted by Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt and others to the classic 40s sax/trumpet bop ensemble, although his debut album as a leader, Pot Pie (1954), did pair him with the bright-toned trumpeter Jon Eardley. He already played in the millionaire Charlie Barnet’s vivacious orchestra, but by in 1955-6 he worked with the bop pianist George Wallington, trumpeter Kenny Dorham and Frederich Gulda. Woods then began working with Dizzy Gillespie, whose globetrotting career as a jazz ambassador for America was beginning to accelerate – the assignment took Woods to South America and the near east.

                                   

For the next decade he led a number of small jazz groups, including a quintet with Gene Quill. He also performed in Buddy Rich's band, toured Europe with Quincy Jones (1959-60) and the USSR with Benny Goodman (1962), and worked as a studio musician, playing various reed instruments for recording sessions, television, films and advertising jingles. During the summers from 1964 to 1967 he taught at the Ramblerny performing arts camp in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In March 1968 Woods moved to France, which marked his return to playing small-group jazz. In Paris that same year he formed a quartet called the European Rhythm Machine with player Henri Texier, and the drummer Daniel Humair. The group remained intact until 1972, when Woods organized an experimental electronic quartet in Los Angeles. This was given a cold reception and soon disbanded.

Woods then moved to the East Coast, and in October 1973 formed an outstanding acoustic jazz group with Mike Melillo, Steve Gilmore, and Bill Goodwin. With this ensemble he won acclaim as the finest alto saxophonist in mainstream jazz, a reputation  confirmed by his performances on Images(1975 with Michel Legrand), Live from the Showboat (1976) and I love you just the way you are (1977 with singer Billy Joel, all of which he received Grammy awards).  With Hal Galper replacing Melillo (1981) and Tom Harrell added to the group (1983), Woods continued to tour internationally and record into the late 1980's. He began to play clarinet on a regular basis, especially in combination with Harrell's muted trumpet.

His repertory expanded to include not only bop (Airegin, 1974), but also, with the European Rhythm Machine, funk (The Meeting) and occasional passages of free jazz (Riot (both 1970), and with his new group, Latin jazz (Brazilian Affair, 1076). In 1979, Woods recorded the album More Live at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Woods, along with Rick Chamberlain and Ed Joubert, founded the organization Celebration of the Arts (COTA) in 1978 late one night in the bar at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. The organization would eventually become the Delaware Water Gap Celebration of the Arts. Their initial goal was to help foster an appreciation of jazz and its relationship to other artistic disciplines. Each year, the organization hosts the Celebration of the Arts Festival in September.

A series of brilliant albums for the Concord label, including Bop Stew (1987), Bouquet (1989) and Flash (1992), confirmed Woods’s elevation to the front rank of the world’s jazz soloists, a position he had deserved long previously. The trombonist Hal Crook and trumpeter Brian Lynch took Harrell’s place after 1989. Always a perfectionist, Woods often insisted on unplugged, all-acoustic performances even in jazz premises apparently unsuited to such low-key methods, but his commitment and musicality usually won over the most unruly of audiences.

Woods also took his role as a teacher very seriously, helping to found an annual arts festival in Delaware, and regularly taking masterclasses and musician-in-residence roles with student jazz bands around the world, including the National Youth Jazz Orchestra in Britain, and the Catania City Brass Orkestra in Italy. Woods would frequently take the featured-soloist role in these enterprises, performing as if there were nothing in the world he would rather be doing.

He developed a productive musical relationship with the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi in the 90s, and Woods regularly documented his work both in the US and in Europe throughout the decade. High points were The Complete Concert (1996), live from the Wigmore Hall – a performance that caught Woods in more keening and delicate mood, notably on the Bill Evans dedication Goodbye Mr Evans; and Celebration! (1997), an American big band album in which Woods sweeps through a repertoire to which he contributed most of the arrangements with all the composed fire of his earlier years, and no hint of the chronic emphysema that hampered his work late in his life.

He was fluently creative, making characteristically witty spoken asides, on tributes to Marty Paich and Woody Herman with the Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra in 2004, and became a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and received a Living Legend jazz award from the Kennedy Center in 2007. His last significant recording was 2011’s Man With the Hat, a co-leader session with fellow alto saxophonist Grace Kelly. Carrying his obligatory oxygen tank, Woods was playing in Pittsburgh with members of the city’s symphony orchestra as recently as 4 September, interpreting his own arrangements of the famous Charlie Parker With Strings repertoire and announced at the end of the show that he would be retiring. He died a little more than three weeks later of emphysema on September 29, 2015, at the age of 83.

(Edited from The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz & John Fordham's obit for the Guardian)