Paul Horn Biography
17 March 1930, New York, USA. Horn started to play the piano at the age of four and moved on to the saxophone when he was 12. He studied the flute at Oberlin College Conservatory during 1952 and went on to the Manhattan School of Music the following year. He played with the Sauter-Finnegan Orchestra as tenor soloist before joining Chico Hamilton's Quintet (1956-58). Then he settled to work in Hollywood's film studios. He was the main soloist in Lalo Schifrin's Jazz Suite Of Mass Texts in 1965 and worked with Tony Bennett the following year. During 1967 he went to India where he became a teacher of transcendental meditation. Later he toured China (1979) and the USSR (1983). In 1970, Horn had settled on an island near Victoria, British Colombia where he formed his own quintet, presented a weekly television show and founded his own record company called Golden Flute (1981). He wrote scores for the Canadian National Film Board and won an award for the score of Island Eden. Horn's education and keen travelling encouraged and enabled him to expand his music beyond jazz into what he hoped would be "universal music". In 1968, he recorded an album of solo flute pieces in the Taj Mahal making use of the half-minute reverberation time; he later recorded at the Great Pyramid of Cheops near Cairo and even produced a record using the sound of whales as an accompaniment. For Horn, the term jazz merely describes the revival in this century of the art of improvisation and it is this that he continues to do either solo on a variety of flutes including the Chinese ti-tzi, or in a duo with David Friesen on bass.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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