Woody Birch

Tommy Potter's Hard Funk is the title of what has been, in some periods, an extremely hard-to-find album of bebop featuring bassist Tommy Potter leading a small combo. The pianist on the date is Freddie Redd, an expatriate American living in Sweden. The rest of the players on the session were from that country and Finland. One of them was pretending to be a tree, for a reason that has never been established. Woody Birch is the credit given for one of the tenor saxophonists on this album, a pseudonym in the grand tradition of Muddy Waters performing as Dirty Rivers or Buddy Guy getting a credit as Friendly Chap. Whether Bjorksten, like the previously mentioned bluesmen, changed his name to avoid contract disputes is unknown; it seems unlikely considering the man's docile background as the son of a piano teacher. From the '50s on, the reedman who would grow into a Woody Birch was obsessed with the cool jazz style, drawing from a palate of Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims, and Stan Getz impressions when it was time for a solo. Gunnar Bjorksten began leading a septet under his real name in the first half of the '50s. During the course of his career he has performed on clarinet, alto, and tenor saxophone and flute; under the shade of the Birch nom-de-sax he has only played tenor. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide