Jazz saxophonist Phil Woods dies at age 83 in Pennsylvania

Mr. Woods was a hero to countless musicians, including local jazz drummer and pianist Marko Marcinko, artistic director of the Scranton Jazz Festival, which Mr. Woods played in 2008.

“There was a very specific reason Phil played on almost every album I’ve made since 1956 because he not only was the best jazz alto sax players there was, he was a truly lovely person”.

Mr. Woods had emphysema but continued to perform until shortly before his death using an oxygen tank – his “amplifier”, he said.

Mr. Woods received four Grammy Awards – the first for the 1975 album “Images,” made with Michel Legrand, and the last for the 1982 album ” At The Vanguard”, featuring the Phil Woods Quartet.

Woods released more than 50 albums as a leader and many more as a sideman with such jazz luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and Clark Terry.

Woods grew up in the Swing Era where his early influences included alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges. He studied at Juilliard and landed a career break in the mid-1950s when Quincy Jones urged Gillespie to take the young sax man on tour.

Jazz critic Nate Chinen, writing in the New York Times, once observed that Mr. Woods was capable of “bulletlike runs and flurries”, with a sound that was “pinpoint-clear”, and that “he leaned into his notes, giving them a physical presence in the room”.

“It’s a real big loss”, Mr. Marcinko said Wednesday.

Woods toured Europe with Jones’ big band in 1959, and three years later took part in Benny Goodman’s historic tour of Russian Federation.

Born in Springfield, Mass., on November. 2, 1931, Woods began playing saxophone at the age of 12 after inheriting one from his uncle. Woods carried Parker’s speed and technical ability to his own recordings. “Jazz will never perish”, he said at the time. But it wasn’t only political dissatisfaction. The masters left us such a high watermark in performance that – but I’m afraid that’s the reality of any art. You’ve got to be better than the generation that spawned you.

Mr. Woods’s marriage to Parker ended in divorce. He was also mentored by Parker’s former bandmate, Dizzy Gillespie, and was even married Parker’s widow, Chan, for almost 20 years. But after five years, he returned to the United States of America, settled in Delaware Water Gap, Pa. and resumed his career as a straight-ahead bandleader and performer.

He played on Paul Simon’s “Have a Good Time” and Steely Dan’s “Doctor Wu”, but it was Woods’ memorable sax solo on Joel’s 1977 hit “Just The Way You Are” for which he most recently was remembered.