Paul Winter (b. 1939)

Born and raised in the small town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, Paul Winter began playing drums, piano, and clarinet at the age of five. He added saxophone to his repertoire in the fourth grade, and it gradually became his instrument. He played wherever he could-in brass bands, marching bands, a Dixieland jazz band and a nine-piece dance band. As a student at Northwestern University, he formed the Paul Winter Sextet. This cool, post-bebop group won first prize at the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival. Among the judges were legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and equally legendary scholar of American musicology, John Hammond. Hammond immediately signed him to Columbia Records.

Sponsored by the United States State Department, the group set off in 1962 on a goodwill tour of 23 Latin American countries. In those days, with the gentle bossa nova only just beginning to surface in the commercial mainstream, the complex rhythms and vivid harmonic colors of Brazil were very little known in the United States. For Winter, exposure to the sambas, rumbas, and cançons of Brazil was an epiphany. He fell in love with the country, the music, and the people. He also met a young guitarist, Oscar Castro-Neves, who was to become his lifelong friend and collaborator. Brazil became, and remains, Winter's second home. The rich musical heritage of Brazil has been a major influence on Winter's music, and his impressions of Brazil have been captured on several albums, among them Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova, The Sound of Ipanema, and Rio.

In 1967 inspired by the music of the great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), Winter created the Paul Winter Consort. This adventurous ensemble took the name 'consort' from Elizabethan music, and comprised woodwinds, strings and assorted percussion. The consort was to become the focus of Winter's vision-a vision that combined cultural influences from all over the world, and eventually embraced the "greater symphony of the earth." Winter first heard the eerie sounds of communities of humpbacked whales in 1968, and immediately responded with the voice of his own soprano saxophone, and the musical community of the consort. The haunting sound of a wolf-pack stimulated a similar response from Winter.

In 1980 Winter formed his own recording company, Living Music Records. Winter takes musicians out of the studio and into the natural world, of which Winter sees his music as a vital part. He takes recording equipment to the banks of rivers, to the ocean's shore, into deep woodland, and into the heart of the Grand Canyon, to capture "Earth Music." He also takes it into the vaults of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, in New York City, where the Consort are Artists in Residence.

Paul Winter likes to recall a remark that the composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) once made about Henry Thoreau (1817-1862). The philosopher lived by Walden Pond in the wild woodland of New England, surrounded by the sounds of nature. He played the flute. Ives said Thoreau was a great musician not because he played the flute but because he didn't have to go to Boston to hear the symphony. Paul Winter has dedicated himself to listening to what he calls the "greater symphony of the earth." His aim is to add his own distinctive voice to that great, natural music.

Back to Composers and Lyricists