I think [Phil Wood] didn't suffer fools gladly, but he loved supporting young people that loved the music.

Negative people often tend to create negative cultures whereas positive corporate cultures are created by positive people.

Particularly, in my situation, I needed a way out of where I was. So music was that.

I was also sitting in from the middle of senior year of high school at Sweet Basil, it was a great club in New York.

If I could have picked two guys on the planet, to have some exposure to at that age, those were the two right guys [Phil Woods and Charles McPherson].

Connection to the music and the history was very powerful to me. I think that's what I feel the most blessed about.

[Charlie "Bird" Parker] would sit down and ask [Phil Wood], "What do you think about this whole secondary Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? Are you listening to that music and what do you feel about it?" These were the conversations that he was having. And he also said, what he learned from Charlie Parker was, not that he studied with him in the formal sense, is that the first thing that Charlie Parker would always ask was, "Did you eat today?".