Paul Winter

Paul Winter (born August 31, 1939) is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader.

He is a pioneer of world music and earth music, which interweaves the voices of the wild with instrumental voices from classical, jazz and world music.

The music is often improvised and recorded in nature to reflect the qualities brought into play by the environment.

Winter was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, United States.

He studied piano and clarinet, then fell in love with saxophone in the fourth grade.

He started the Little German Band with his schoolmates when he was twelve, then a Dixieland band, and a nine-piece dance band known as The Silver Liners.

He became enthralled by big bands and bebop bands of the 1950s.

After graduating from Altoona Area High School in 1957, he spent the summer on a tour of state fairs in the Midwest with the conductor and members of the Ringling Brothers Circus Band.

At Northwestern University, he majored in English and visited jazz clubs in Chicago.

In the mid-1960s, Winter lived for a year in Brazil.

It became a second home for him and he recorded several albums there.

The Paul Winter Consort recorded during the 1960s and 1970s.

Four albums for A&M were produced by Phil Ramone and Paul Stookey.

Astronauts of Apollo 15 took the Consort's album Road to the moon with them and named two craters after the songs "Ghost Beads" and "Icarus".

George Martin produced the album Icarus and considered it one of the best he produced.

The band Oregon was formed by band members who worked on this album: Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, and Collin Walcott.

In 1961, his sextet won the Intercollegiate Jazz Festival and was signed by Columbia Records.

He was accepted by the University of Virginia Law School, but postponed that plan when during the next year the sextet went on a goodwill tour of Latin America, as cultural ambassadors for the United States State Department, playing 160 concerts in 23 countries.

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy invited the band to perform at the White House.

The performance in the East Room on November 19, 1962 was the first jazz concert in the White House.

Rio was released in 1965 with liner notes by Vinicius de Moraes.

In 1967 he started the Paul Winter Consort, influenced by Heitor Villa-Lobos and other Brazilian music, to give ensemble playing and soloing equal importance, analogous to a democracy where every voice would count.

Recordings of humpback whales in 1968 influenced his music, and his desire to become an environment activist.

In 1977, his album Common Ground was his first to incorporate sounds of whales, eagles, and wolves into his music.

In the early 1980s, Winter began traveling to the Soviet Union.

In 1980, Winter founded Living Music Records as a forum for his musical and ecological vision.

The name alludes to his desire to make timeless music in natural acoustic spaces like stone churches, canyons, and barns.

Winter is a member of the Lindisfarne Association, founded by William Irwin Thompson, of scientists, artists, scholars, and contemplatives devoted to the study and realization of a planetary culture.

Through this organization, Winter met the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

In 1980, Dean Morton invited him to become artist-in-residence there, to build bridges between spirituality and the environment with his music.

St. John the Divine Cathedral is the largest gothic cathedral in the world and known as "the green cathedral."

In the 1980s and 1990s, it became the center of a vital community of thinkers and seekers working on issues of ecology and environment and world peace.

In 1984, he ventured as far as Lake Baikal in Siberia, and found it so beautiful that he returned to try to protect it.

In 1984, he became friends with Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Winter took part in the U.S.–Soviet Space Bridge to encourage collaboration between Russians and Americans.

On a tour of the Soviet Union in 1986, the Consort performed with the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble at Moscow University.

During the next year the two bands recorded the album EarthBeat in Moscow and New York.

It was the first album of music created together by Americans and Russians.

He borrowed the name from English Elizabethan theater of the 16th and 17th centuries, when bands combined woodwinds, strings, and percussion, the same families of instruments he wanted to combine in his contemporary consort.

With this group, he became one of the earliest creators of world music.