The Master at 83
Yesterday was Phil Woods’s 83rd birthday. I wrote about Woods in August when he performed at the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival and was honored by Mayor Sarno with a proclamation and the keys to the city. Read more about Phil’s background on the earlier blog, Phil Woods, Springfield’s Jazz Pilgrim. For now, here’s a selection of concert performances of recent vintage that feature him with string ensembles and orchestras. Phil has been hampered in recent years by emphysema, but his playing seems undiminished and he remains one of the giants of the alto saxophone.
The first was filmed at Redondo Beach, CA in 2001. Phil plays “Just Friends,” the most critically-acclaimed of the “Bird with Strings” recordings that his hero Charlie Parker made in 1949. Hank Jones, who recorded with Bird, is here at the piano; Kevin Axt on bass; and Paul Kriebach on drums. Phil tags the performance with a story about the encouragement he got from Parker. It’s edited in this clip, but he tells it more fully in this blog I posted two weeks ago with Woods and Jimmy Heath speaking with Gary Smulyan.
Also from 2001, Phil was a featured soloist with Michel Legrand at the Montreal Jazz Festival where they played Legrand’s “Watch What Happens.”
Woods is a perennial favorite every summer at the Marciac Jazz Festival in France. When I was there in 1999, he fronted his own 18-piece big band. Here in 2005, he played “I’ll Remember April” with the orchestra of the National Conservatory of Toulouse.
Dizzy Gillespie played a critical role in Phil’s early career. Like Woods, Dizzy’s mother was a Springfield native, and who knows but that John Birks Gillespie and Philip Wells Woods felt a special kinship as a result? Woods was a charter member of the big band Gillespie led on State Department tours of the Middle East and South America in 1956 and ’57. Phil often tells the story of how Dizzy and Ray Brown talked sense into him at a time when he was languishing with self-pity and racial self-consciousness over his playing and his identity as a jazz musician. Here’s Phil two years ago with Jon Faddis and the late Frank Wess playing Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High” with the Barcelona Jazz Orchestra.