Phil Woods came up in Springfield, Massachusetts, studied clarinet seriously, then landed in New York at Juilliard with a horn and an obsession with Charlie Parker. That obsession followed him his whole career, sometimes literally — he married Chan Parker, Bird's widow, and for a while carried the weight of being 'the guy who took Bird's old lady and Bird's old sound.' It's a strange thing to live under, and Woods handled it the only way that made sense: by getting so good, so fast, so precise on the horn that nobody could call him an imitation anymore.

What you actually hear when you put on a Phil Woods record is bebop played by a guy with absurd control — clean articulation, a cry in the tone, phrases that turn corners you didn't see coming. He was a first-call session player in New York for years, which meant he showed up on everything from film scores to pop records, most famously blowing the alto solo on Billy Joel's 'Just the Way You Are' in 1977. That one solo probably reached more ears than his entire catalog combined, and it's a nice snapshot of what made him valuable: give him sixteen bars in any context and he'll make it count.

In the late 1960s he moved to Europe and led a group called the European Rhythm Machine, which pushed his playing into looser, more modal territory than the straight bebop he'd been known for. It's worth hearing if you only know him as a hard-bop guy — it shows he wasn't just running Parker licks on autopilot. When he came back to the States he settled in the Pocono Mountains and led the Phil Woods Quintet for decades, a working band in the old sense, built around tight writing and the kind of chemistry you only get from playing with the same guys for years.

He kept performing well into his eighties despite emphysema, playing with an oxygen tank parked near the stage, which tells you something about how much the horn meant to him — not a myth, just a guy who didn't know how to stop. Start with Musique du Bois (1974) for the quartet version of Woods, or Images (1975) if you want to hear him with strings and still cutting through. Either way you'll hear a bebop player who never treated the tradition as a museum piece — he just kept living inside it.