It's not easy to smile while you're playing a saxophone, but the entire sax section of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra is grinning with pleasure as they play the final voicings of a standard. Why? They're accompanying a brilliant improvisation by American alto saxophonist Phil Woods, a genuine jazz legend whose passionate way of getting inside each note and phrase must seem to them to be touched by the hand of God, or at least Bird.
The presence of Woods as star soloist is electrifying, pushing NYJO's young players to perform with extra flair and swing, without abandoning their customary accuracy and homogeneity. Woods also supplies a handful of great arrangements, including Here's That Rainy Day and Serpent's Tooth, which the band tackle with minimal rehearsal time. Out Of The Woods (by NYJO alumnus Evan Jolly) is a tribute to Woods, based on some of the great man's solos, in which a labyrinthine, boppish melody gives way to a blistering alto solo.
Souvenir, the gorgeous Benny Carter tribute to Johnny Hodges is a chance for the saxophonist to explore his pre-bop roots, while Bana Luca, a Woods original, is a relaxed 12-bar blues that provides space for the saxophonist's pantonal pattern-making and gutsy wailing - both agitated and groovy.
What makes this heroic and virtuoso display all the more remarkable is the fact that Woods, who turns 72 in November, suffers from emphysema. (Signs throughout the club instruct the audience not to smoke.) Backstage before the performance, with nose tubes hooked up to an oxygen cylinder, he chats gently to old friends. On stage, waiting for the next cue, he looks weary. But once the music calls, he plays like a demon - or an angel. When he fills the lengthy improvised passages on Here's That Rainy Day - a chart he first gave to NYJO in 1968 - with cascading, hard-edged bebop lines, there's still a tinge of melodic sentimentality, a quality never far from the surface of the most hard-bitten jazzbo.
Early in the set, there's a moment when he seems short of breath, his phrases clipped. But then, as if to confound our fears, he tears without pause into a luminous, heart-rending alto sax cadenza, playing with the energy of someone a third his age, a living, breathing link to 52nd St, and the classic era of jazz.
