On April 24, 1983, Chris Wood cut what would be his final piece of music. Recorded in Birmingham, his first stomping ground and now his last harbour, what was put on to tape that day carried an air of fragile, wounded beauty. Wood’s tenor sax playing on the otherwise bubbling three-minute track doesn’t have the liquid smoothness of his greatest years, when playing seemed effortless to him, but instead sounds like it was dredged from the very depths of his soul. It was as if, right there and then, he somehow found the strength to summon all the hurt, pain and wrongness of the world and blow it out.
The piece was meant to soundtrack, of all things, BBC TV’s coverage of live basketball, although Wood never did hear it aired. Within weeks of the session he was dead, aged just 39, his ravaged body and a broken heart having given up on him. The musical legacy Wood left behind stretches across three decades, through numerous collectives, and is imprinted upon a handful of dazzling albums. A classic foil and sideman, Wood’s gift was to add colour to the landscapes of other people’s recordings, and in so doing give them dimension and defining features. Among those he played with were his friend Jimi Hendrix, Free, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Ginger Baker and Dr John. Yet it was as a multi-instrumentalist with Traffic that Wood soared highest, unshackled to ride the flow of that band’s often wondrous music.
