[Dixielandjazz] Phil Woods RIP

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Phil Woods was something!  Survived his playing career by only a month.  
On nearer to OKOM lines was the experience of his ballad playing, with a huge sound which didn't sound like anything other than an alto, but had considerable substance, very much his own.  

He came to the Glasgow Jazz Festival amid press headlines one year that he was the owner of Charlie Parker's alto, and at his gig had a great time denying this, though with a dead patch.  This occurred because almost the entire audience was innocent of any awareness of the name Ozzie Nelson, whom Phil claimed was the previous owner of his clarinet.  In jazz improvisation it's always the next note which really matters, and Phil as a very fertile soloist got in quickly with the claim that he had George Shearing's golf clubs.  I do however suspect that Mr. Shearing, might like other people who had not as yet been blind for their whole life, had an actualised the potential to spoil a good walk indulging that strange practice.  

Undoubtedly a man sensitive about others' feelings, said the more nearly Cleanhead friend who came along with me to a Phil Woods gig in Glasgow, for Phil played with a cap on presumably to make the rest of the band not feel bad about his having such a substantial crop of hair, when although none of them had quite a fine head of skin, well.  

I can just see Phil in Heaven with Al Cohn and Benny Waters,  and Al saying to Benny, how come when he was only half a dozen years younger than I was you referred to him as "a white boy" and to me as "a fellow veteran"?  
Perhaps years of service to the tenor rather than alto saxophone?  


Robert R. Calder