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Lewis, who died in 1968, spent most of his life playing obscure New Orleans dance halls and parades until his "discovery" in the mid-'40s. Yet he had something that touched people all over the world. Wherever his records were available, young musicians strove to copy his sound. Woody first confronted this phenomenon in 1971, when he went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage ! Festival and sat in on some French Quarter jam sessions. "There was a Japanese George Lewis and a British George Lewis and a Jewish George Lewis. It was really hilarious."
Woody remembers that trip, along with two earlier jaunts to the Crescent City, as high points of his life. Accompanied by Diane Keaton, he scurried around the French Quarter with his clarinet under his arm, looking, listening and sitting in with local jazzmen. "It was like watching Willie Mays all your life and then finding yourself in the outfield with him," Woody recalls. Festival producer George Wein even talked him into playing a set at one of the official concerts.
That unscheduled appearance prompted New York Times music critic John S. Wilson to hail Woody's playing as "one of the most invigorating and encouraging evidences of the continuity of the New Orleans jazz tradition." Other critics have not been so effusive. "I wouldn't rate him as a professional," says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. "It's cute; it doesn't do any harm."
Cute is the last thing Woody wants to be. Though he calls jazz his hobby, he pursues it with the utmost seriousness. He practices religiously -- up to two hours a day -- usually in the bedroom of his two-story Fifth Avenue penthouse. But even when he's working on location, he makes time for the horn. "There have been times when I would film all day long and wouldn't get to my hotel room until 10:30 at night," he says. "So I would get into bed and pull the quilt over my head so I wouldn't offend the neighbors." Missing a single day's practice, says Woody, makes him feel "absolutely consumed with guilt. You know, it's like when people break their diet or something."
Woody, who neither reads nor writes music, is the first to admit his technical shortcomings. "I feel that I don't really have much of a musical talent at all. I have enthusiasm and affection and obsession for the music. But I wasn't born with the real equipment for it. I mean, I'm totally eclectic and derivative of the guys I've heard and loved." His one advantage for playing the old-style New Orleans stuff, Woody feels, "is that I am genuinely crude." Another advantage is his ability to reproduce the powerful, wailing tone of the original jazzmen. The biggest compliment he ever got as a musician, Woody says, was when he was jamming in New Orleans and local people told him how "indigenous" his sound was. Jazz clarinetist Kenny Davern agrees: "He has sought to get that New Orleans plaintive sound, and he has really captured the thing."