Asbury Park Press (Asbury Park, NJ)
Don Lass : 07/13/1962

This is Woods’ first album as a leader and the young alto saxophonist amply demonstrates that he is a creative soloist with a strong feeling for jazz. Woods’ style has developed immensely since the Lookin’ Good album last year with trumpeter Joe Gordon, who is also featured on two tracts in this set. Woods’ alto is avant garde but he wisely keeps within the bounds of good musical taste. On Roma, his own composition, Woods weaves absorbing creative patterns over a scintillating 3/4 rhythm set down by bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Milt Turner. The remainder of this intriguing set features several compositions by Woods and time-tested standards like Love for Sale. This is an excellent start indeed for the saxophonist.

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The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)
Les Zacheis : 08/12/1962

Another new jazz musician is introduced by Contemporary label as alto saxist Jimmy Woods appears in an LP titled Awakening (after the title tune). Woods has appeared on record before (Joe Gordon’s Lookin’
Good), but this is his own show.

A buddy of Ornette Coleman, he plays in a style that can be described as a crying legato fashion. He displays a substantial amount of inventive originality. His style is in sharp contrast to the accompanying trumpeter, Gordon, with his terse, clipped phrases.

Of special interest is the reading of an up-tempo Love for Sale that gets going real good and Roma, a ballad in three-quarter.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Joe Goldberg : November, 1962

Interest: Importont new musician
Perforniance: Powerfully assured
Recording: Very good
Stereo Quality: Realistic

As is likely to happen in a period of jazz pioneering, another important new saxophonist appears on the scene. His name is Jimmy Woods, and although on occasion he is reminiscent of others, he is, in the main, an original. He plays alto with a tone like that of Cannonball Adderley or even Oliver Nelson; he sounds like Eric Dolphy on Love For Sale, but such hoarse shouting is a climactic effect, not the norm. He is busy extending the jazz tradition, not departing from it.

Woods is also a composer of stature and promise. Not Yet is a passionate evocation of blues essence; Roma is a lengthy, complex waltz; Liltle Jim has a long. charming, effortlessly continuous line; A New Twist is a hilarious satire of Horace Silver and Ray Charles, more sheer fun than any piece in a very long time.

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St. Paul Recorder (Minneapolis, MN)
Albert Anderson : 08/31/1962

Woods scores a big hit with this waxing … Perhaps all the more so because he’s evidently written the tunes (excepting Circus and Love for Sale) to suit his own artistry and that of his sidemen … Inventiveness, melody and rhythm are the forte of this stimulating sax virtuoso … Moreover, he sees to it that the entire session remains melodious, a quality that is lacking in several of today’s recordings … This is an interesting set from start to finish, but if a single tune must be singled out as the best, it is the title number … On this, Woods is at his peak, blowing a vibrant, tuneful solo … But he is also delightful on Love for Sale, a sentimental entry … Woods also gets yeoman assistance from his sidekicks, especially Trice and Peacock (on Not Yet) … The switching on the different tracks are also appropriate, and adds to Woods’ ability as a leader … This is an outstanding set, to say the least … Look for it to move across the sales counter

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Down Beat : 08/16/1962
Don DeMichael : 4.5 stars

I had heard Woods only once before this album—on Joe Gordon’s Lookin’ Good on Contemporary—and I was unimpressed by his playing. This, his first as leader, is something else entirely. The talent he displays here is electrifying. First, there’s his playing. Woods seems to have taken inspiration from the work of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy—there are traces of each in his playing. But what Woods plays comes out unmistakably Woods.

He is not prone to use a lot of notes, though there is an aura of great movement and excitement boiling about his altoing. And even when he is at fever pitch, say, on his with-a-whoop-and-a-holler Awakening solo or his Love for Sale skitter, he never loses control. He is much more a melodist than a dazzler. Nor is Woods without humor; on New Twist he throws in an old-time lick that is a breakup.

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Woods’ work is his sense of rhythm. He has the ability to stretch and compress time much the way Dexter Gordon does. It’s a way of playing eighth notes that gives the illusion of there being more space between the notes than there should be.

There’s another side to Woods’ talent: his writing. With the exception of Circus and Love for Sale, the album’s themes are his. None is run of the mill. For instance, the 3/4 Roma, named for his wife Romanita, is made up of 10 eight-bar phrases, only three of them repeated. Little Jim also is oddly constructed: AAABCA, in eight-bar sections. The humor and spareness of his playing is in his writing too; New Twist is tongue-in-cheek funk, and there is no lost motion in Not Yet, which is reminiscent of Oliver Nelson’s work.

His cohorts acquit themselves well, Trice and Peacock even more than that. On Not Yet Peacock is superb in a floating solo—that speechlike, sharp-angled manner of playing that many bassists have found to their tastes since Scott LaFaro perfected it. Trice is lean, hard, and of the Bud Powell school, and while his playing lacks the polish and grace of Whittington’s, it is more stimulating. Turner is a sympathetic drummer, pushing and driving Woods and the others, but he evidently got overexcited on the title track—the tempo rushes.

Of the two trumpet men, Banks has a slight edge. His wry, puck-a-puck-a work is joyous and to the point. Both Gordon and Banks are on Love and indulge in a heated two choruses, separated by flaming Woods. An impressive debut album.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff
March 20, 1962

Jazz remains intriguingly unpredictable because it continually attracts so many new players who seem to have the capacity to make singular contributions to the music. In most cases, however, it takes considerable time to be reasonably sure which of the “new stars” are not just auditory illusions. Only rarely, in my own experience, have I been convinced at a first hearing that an unknown is most surely going to become known, and for a long time to come. One such occasion was in Contemporary’s studios early in 1958 when I listened to Ornette Coleman for the first time. Another was in the course of reviewing Joe Gordon’s Lookin’ Good (Contemporary M3597, S7597). One man on that session, alto saxophonist Jimmy Woods, seized my attention with such force that I had no doubts at all that a major awakening was taking place, and this album—Woods’ initial set as a leader—strikingly reinforces that impression.

The qualities most immediately evident in Woods’ playing are his passionate, penetrating sound and speech-like phrasing; fiercely secure sense of swing, and an empirical commitment to freedom that leads him into new ways of expanding the jazz language. He is not, it should be emphasized, a follower of Ornette Coleman or any of the other tradition-expanders of this newly restless jazz generation. By himself. Woods has developed his own intensely distinctive style. For all of his provocative daring, moreover, Woods has a much stronger, built-in feeling for cohesiveness than many of the more renowned frontiersmen of contemporary jazz.

Wods came to jazz in mid-adolescence. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, October 29, 1934, Woods moved to Saginaw, Michigan, when he was seven, and four years later, to Seattle. At eleven, he started to play clarinet, but aside from school marching band experience, his musical horizons were limited until four years later when he hung around rehearsals of Bumps Blackwell’s band for which Quincy Jones was an arranger. By the latter part of 1951, Woods was a member of a rhythm and blues combo led by Homer Carter. From 1952-56, he served in the Air Force, and though he did play tenor saxophone at officer’s club dances and similar functions, he had few chances to play jazz except for occasional furloughs to Los Angeles where he sat in at sessions.

After being discharged from the Air Force in September 1956, Woods took a job as a stock boy at Bullock’s department store in Los Angeles, and there he met elevator operator Ornette Coleman. He was not influenced by Coleman’s way of playing. If he had any influence at that time, it was Sonny Rollins. Essentially though, Woods has always worked our his own directions because, for one thing, he has never had enough money to collect records or to visit jazz clubs.

As music jobs became scarce, Woods started to study accounting in February 1957, but an opportunity to go on the road with Roy Milton’s rhythm and biues combo intervened. After some four months with Milton, other rhythm and blues gigs followed, but diminishing work and the theft of his tenor in 1958 caused Woods to withdraw from music for several months until he picked up a friend’s alto from a pawn shop. He immediately felt more comfortable with that instrument.

In February 1959, Woods went back to Los Angeles City College. His major was music and he received an Associate in Arts Degree two years later. Woods rook occasional rhythm and blues gigs to make extra money, but he hadn’t had a jazz job for almost two years when he was asked to replace Walter Benton in Horace Tapscott’s unit. When that job ended in December 1960, Woods put his horn away again until Joe Gordon, who had heard him with Tapscott, called for him for the Lookin’ Good sessions in July 1961. “I was at my wit’s end then,” Jimmy recalls. “That seemed like my last chance. If I didn’t make it, I felt I’d really be strung up and never be able to do what I wanted.”

However, Woods was signed by Contemporary, and Awakening! is the first result. Jimmy continues going to school, and supports his family as a night attendant in the Probation Department at Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. “I still want to make my career in music,” Jimmy emphasizes, “but I took this job because I felt that if I couldn’t play, I could at least communicate with people in this way.”

On the basis of this extraordinarily personal and powerful album, I expect that, as difficult as the jazz life can be, a place will have to be made in jazz for this quality of musical communication. Woods, as you will hear, is not only a startlingly stimulating player, but a fresh addition to the comparatively thin ranks of indigenous jazz composers.

Awakening!, like most of Woods’ compositions, was shaped gradually over a period of time. “I hear part of a melody,” says Woods, “write it down, and then I may not hear more of it for days.” This song took form as Woods paced the corridors of Juvenile Hall by night. Structured in thirty-two bars, the tune starts with an eight-bar interlude, and the interlude is repeated between the bridge and the last eight bars. There is an intriguing contrast between Martin Banks crisply cohesive solo and Woods’ statement which, though wilder in sound and design, is not less organized.

Circus illuminates one aspect of Woods: lyricism; Woods, like all major and potentially major jazzmen, is essentially lyrical in the sweeping ardor of his conception. In his work, the “cry of jazz” is uninhibited. A lonelier evocation of that “cry” is heard in the piercingly poignant Not Yet. The tune is in forty-eight bar form, and contains a remarkably conceived and executed solo by bassist Gary Peacock, who has grown markedly in the past few years.

Woods’ rhythm assurance is also resiliently clear in Not Yet. “Music, before it sounds good to me,” says Woods, “has to be rhythmic.” New Twist indicates further how inventively rhythmic Woods can be.

The opening of Love for Sale telescopes two basic elements in Jimmy Woods’ playing—the spare but rhapsodic tenderness of the a cappella introduction and the surging virility of his plunge into regular jazz pulsation. A third element—the ability to continually surprise—is also explosively evident in this track, and for that matter, throughout the album.

Woods’ own favorite number in the album is Roma, an eighty-bar ode to his wife, Romanita. “She’s been an inspiration to me,” Woods says, “as I’ve attempted to combine music, and education and work. She’s understood and accepted the many disappointments we’ve suffered. I feel this tune, even in its angry moments, expresses the unity and sincerity of our relationship.” * Roma is in 3/4, and rarely has a jazz soloist superimposed so absorbing a series of rhythmic variations on that meter.

Little Jim is Jimmy Woods’ son. Before going to work one evening. Jimmy had scolded him. The impetus for the song came from a symphonic piece which Woods heard on the radio at work that night. “Little Jim itself,” Woods explains, “is not a literal offspring of the symphonic work, but I was feeling sad, and I was influenced by the melancholy of the classical melody.” A feeling of regret at having to hurt someone you love—even if it is for his own good—pervades Little Jim. Here, as in Woods’ other originals, the immediacy of emotion comes from the face that Woods playing and writing is a direct extension of his daily experiences, hopes, and frustrations. There are no barriers of self-conscious “artistic problem-solving.” For Woods, music is part of speech, a more thorough way of expressing who he is and who he wants to be.

Anticipation was written in 1957. “When I did this on the date,” Woods says, “I decided to write two bars of 3/4 and one bar of 2/4 in two sections of the tone so that the anticipatory beat on the fourth bears of the third and seventh measures would sound more pronounced. During the saxophone and trumpet choruses, the tune is played alternately in 4/4 and 3/4. The piano choruses are in 4/4; the bass choruses in 3/4; and the drum chorus in 4/4.”

Anticipation is an apt title with which to close Jimmy Woods’ first album as a leader, because it presages an important career and a steadily evolving style which will add new stimulus to the growing desire among jazzmen for more meaningful freedom. In trying to explain the irrepressible force which keeps leading him to freer improvisation, Woods says, “Some of it is probably born of frustration. You’re trying so hard to do something, and it doesn’t seem like you’re succeeding. And so, you get angry playing, and sometimes you feel sad playing. It’s pretty difficult to express all those emotions fully unless you really try to get everything you feel out of your horn. And gradually, you do begin to get a sense of direction and some confidence. Then, you know a certain thing goes there. Even if everybody else says it doesn’t, you know that it just has to be that way. The main thing is to have an idea, and then work it our from there, wherever it leads you. I know I’ll never find what I’m looking for, but just the searching for it to see what comes up is what keeps me going.” And what Woods finds in that search is certain to absorb more and more listeners. His is a bold new voice to add to the “sound of surprise” which is jazz.