Paul Winter Biography
31 August 1939, Altoona, Pennsylvania, USA. Alto saxophonist Winter's self-styled "Earth Music" is a unique fusion of classical, jazz and ethnic musical styles with recorded sounds from the natural world. Winter began playing drums, piano and clarinet as a youngster, before switching to the alto saxophone. He played in several small dance bands and was touring by the age of 17. Winter formed a jazz sextet while studying at Northwestern University, Chicago, which won the Intercollegiate Jazz Festival of 1961. The producer John Hammond Jnr. signed the group to Columbia Records. The US State Department organised a six-month tour of Latin America in 1962, followed by the honour of becoming the first jazz group to officially perform at the White House. The tour "absolutely exploded our conception of what the world was" and the music Winter had heard led to the gradual change of the Sextet into the Paul Winter Consort, which by 1967 had abandoned the traditional jazz format. This was a band with a wholly new instrumentation - classical guitar, English horn, cello, Afro-Brazilian percussion.
The combination of jazz, classical and ethnic instruments remained constant through numerous personnel changes over the following years. It was difficult at the time for Winter to explain just what it was he was trying to produce and record companies found it hard to categorize. Winter now sees it as "celebrating the convergence of both roots of American music - European and African". A series of talented musicians have passed through the Consort - Collin Walcott, Paul McCandless, David Darling and Ralph Towner among them. The 1972 release Icarus was produced by George Martin and described by him as "the finest album I have made". Through the 70s Winter showed an increasing concern with conservation and became an active supporter of Greenpeace. In 1976 he founded the Living Music Foundation, to "explore and implement ways in which music can be used to enrich the lives of human beings, and awaken a spirit of involvement in the preservation of wildlife and the natural environments of the Earth." The following year he released Common Ground, which utilised the recordings he made of whale song taped off the Canadian coast. Three years later Winter formed Living Music Records, further enabling him to pursue his unique musical/ecological vision. The debut release on the label, Callings, was a celebration of the world's oceans. Winter's prolific recorded output includes material recorded in the vaults of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where the Consort are artists in residence. Canyon Lullaby, his first solo album, was taped live in the Grand Canyon. Winter's many honours include the Global 500 Award from the United Nations in recognition of his environmental work. Winter has received many Grammy nominations and won three Best Album awards in the new age category (Spanish Angel, Prayer For The Wild Things, and Celtic Solstice).
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
|
