RARE IS THE ARTIST THAT HAS ACTUALY CREATED A MUSICAL GENRE, BUT THAT AWARD CAN DEFINITELY BE GIVEN TO PAUL WINTER.
AT FIRST AN ALTO SAX PLAYER IN THE BEBOP TRADITION, WINTER BECAME THE FIRST JAZZ MUSICIAN TO PLAY AT THE WHITE HOUSE, DURING THE JFK ADMINISTRATION. DURING THAT FERTILE PERIOD, WINTER WAS A PART OF A STATE DEPARTMENT PROGRAM GOOD WILL TOUR, SPREADING THE GOOD NEWS OF JAZZ.
IN THE PROCESS, WINTER FELL IN LOVE WITH THE SOUNDS OF SAMBA AND BOSSA NOVA, CHANGING HIS MUSICAL TRAJECTION. SINCE THEN, HE FORMED HIS OWN CONSORT, A LARGE PART OF WHICH BRANCHED OFF TO BECOME THE FOLK-JAZZ GROUP OREGON.
SINCE THOSE EARLY YEARS, WINTERS HAS MASTERED THE SOPRANO SAX, BUT HAS USED IT IN HIS ECUMENICAL CONSORT TO REFLECT THE WONDERS OF NATURE. THUS, ALBUMS DEDICATED TO WHALES, THE SUN AND EARTH ARE ANTHEMS TO GOD’S CREATION.
HIS LATES ALBUM IS AN ORGANIC AFFAIR RECORDED WITHIN THE WARMTH OF A BARN, WITH A MIX OF CHAMBER, JAZZ AND AMERICANA ALL CREATING A MUSICAL TAPESTRY.
MR. HORN WAS GRACIOUS ENOUGH TO GIVE BACKGROUND TO HIS GROUNDBREAKING CAREER.
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR LATEST ALBUM
FIRST, YOU’RE 82 YEARS OLD, AND YOU STILL SOUND GREAT ON THE DIFFICULT SOPRANO SAX. HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR CHOPS UP?
That’s a good question.
I’ve actually started practicing the last two years, thanks to the privilege of being home and off the road, which is probably true for most of my compatriots, as concerts have been fewer and farther in between (ED NOTE-due to the COVID lockdown). I play a bit each day, but I haven’t done that for a long time.
The thing about the saxophone that is a boon, is that it is not as physically demanding as a ‘brass’ instrument. Even the oboe is much harder.
For the saxophone, the muscles of the embouchure don’t take as much for a regular amount of playing. Eugene Friesen, our cellist for all of these 43 years, practices intensely. For some of these instruments you have to do this to keep up physically
THE SOPRANO IS AN UNFORGIVING INSTRUMENT IN TERMS OF TONE
Yes, it can be if you play and create the resistance that it doesn’t have according to its conical nature. A clarinet has more resistance. You have to supply the resistance for a soprano sax or it will sound fairly ‘honky’, which some people like.
It seems to me that the traditional classical sound has more automatic vibrato, that after awhile it feels like like you’ve eaten too much baklava! As a desert, I love it, but you can overdo it!
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“It seems to me that the traditional classical sound (of the soprano sax) has more automatic vibrato, that after awhile it feels like like you’ve eaten too much baklava! As a desert, I love it, but you can overdo it”
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WHAT DO YOU LISTEN FOR WHEN YOU HEAR A SOPRANO SAXIST?
Melody has been my muse for as long as I can remember. I listen for people who play melodically. I’m always hoping that I’ll hear a sound that I’ll like.
Taste is a strange and unreconcilable thing. I don’t like the thin sound that most sax players (whether it is tenor or soprano) get in the upper register. You have to supply more resistance so that it won’t sound thin.
If you approach the sax the way that I’ve heard that you have a fixed chin position all of the time, the sax will sound awful at the top. You have to constantly change the ratio of pressure at the reed and the feeling in the voice box. Every note has a different ratio; the highest notes have the highest pressure at the reed and the very least at the voice box. At the low end you have to have the reverse of that.
But you didn’t call to get a sax lesson! (laughs)
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“Melody has been my muse for as long as I can remember. I listen for people who play melodically. I’m always hoping that I’ll hear a sound that I’ll like”
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THIS IS INTERESTING! WHEN DID YOU FINALLY FEEL THAT YOU HAD THIS DOWN?
Probably in the early 80s.
This all comes from (saxist/teacher) Joe Allard.
Joe was the greatest mensch and teacher you could imagine. He honored the fact that the saxophone was a very flexible instrument and that you could get many sounds.
That’s what I’ve liked about it. Over the years, back in the day when I was a jazz scholar, as a kid I could identify 70-100 different sax players.
During my jazz years we played everything loud, and my aspiration was players like Cannonball Adderley and Phil Woods. I then went to Brazil. There, I was completely smitten by a whole other aesthetic which was gentler. I then wanted to play with gentler instruments like classical guitar and cello, so I had to learn to play soft, but not with a ‘wimpy’ sound, which I used to accuse the West Coast players of having.
I went to Joe in ’64, and he asked “Do you want to play with a ‘day’ sound or a ‘night’ sound? I told him that I wanted to play with a ‘night’ sound, and he said he’d help me do that.
For the next years, I went to Joe on Saturdays at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey . We did nothing but look at Grey’s Anatomy. We never practiced technique. It was all about anatomy and sound production; it took me a long time to shift over. That was part of the reason that I let go of the alto in the early 1970s, because I didn’t think I could handle two instruments and lead a band at the same time.
I was also doing a lot more outdoor playing, and the soprano projects more outdoors.
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“For the next years, I went to Joe on Saturdays at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey . We did nothing but look at Grey’s Anatomy. We never practiced technique. It was all about anatomy and sound production”
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WHAT DID HE MEAN BY A “DAY” OR “NIGHT” SOUND?
Light or dark; I wanted to sound like a French Horn.
THIS REMINDS ME OF CLARINETIST BUDDY DEFRANCO ONE TIME TELLING ME THAT HE SPENT HIS WHOLE LIFE “TRYING TO CONQUER THIS FIENDISHLY DIFFICULT INSTRUMENT”
I wonder if most musicians wouldn’t say the same thing; I’m sure oboe players would! Also string players.
A comment like that from a master like Buddy gives you a good example of why he is a great master, because he never took it for granted. He never tried to coast and think “I’ve got it all together so I don’t keep on the quest.”
The people who have questing in their dna enables them to achieve that kind of total mastery.
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“The people who have questing in their dna enables them to achieve that kind of total mastery”
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THAT’S LIKE IN YOUR MOST RECENT ALBUM. YOU ARE NOT HOGGING THE SPOTLIGHT, BUT LIKE THE BEST OF LEADERS LIKE ART BLAKEY, YOU ALLOW THE REST OF THE BAND TO DISPLAY THEIR WARES
That has always been the case with The Consort. I always strive for a pure democracy in which everybody had their voice, and yet the overall sound of the ensemble is still overall. We try do equal rights between the ensemble and the individual.
I’ve always loved the players that I’ve been able to gather in the various ensembles. I’ve wanted to hear them; it’s why I ask them to come and play! I want people to hear cello and oboe in this new album along with these amazing voices of Theresa Thomason.
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“That has always been the case with The Consort. I always strive for a pure democracy in which everybody had their voice, and yet the overall sound of the ensemble is still overall. We try do equal rights between the ensemble and the individual”
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WHY DID YOU CHOOSE A BARN FOR MAKING THE RECORDING?
The pandemic had a lot to do with it.
We couldn’t be in the cathedral, so we had to find an alternative venue 1320. As you can imagine, the cathedral is a pretty hard act to follow for finding a place with extraordinary space and acoustics.
We figured that since live streaming is such a part of the culture, why don’t we just play here in the barn, just stream it and not worry about an audience. It was great fun; it was a whole new ballgame for us.
YOU’VE HAD VARIOUS MUSICIANS IN YOUR CONSORTS, AND SOME VERY BIG NAMES LIKE RALPH TOWNER, PAUL MCCANDLESS< GLEN MOORE AND COLLIN WALCOTT. IS THERE A MAJOR MUSICAL WORLD VIEW THAT YOU TRY TO IMPART TO ARTISTS IN YOUR ENSEMBLES?
I think that all of us are just aspiring to share the love and beauty that inspires us. The beauty of places that we’ve been, or people we’ve known. It’s why singer/songwriters write love songs and why you bring home pictures of the Grand Canyon.
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“I think that all of us are just aspiring to share the love and beauty that inspires us. The beauty of places that we’ve been, or people we’ve known”
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SOMETIMES MUSICIANS FORGET THAT A SONG IS SUPPOSED TO TELL A STORY
There are so many different motivations for making music.
There are people who just love the art, the gymnastics and the virtuosity. That’s fine, too; not everybody will respond to that, and it’s why many listeners are baffled when they hear highly technical jazz.
I think we all get into music because we love making sounds. Symbolically, the instrumental pieces are stories in a way, or they are little journeys through the landscape of different chord changes and melodies.
TELL ME ABOUT THE ALBUM THAT CAME OUT A FEW YEARS AGO WHERE YOUR JAZZ COMBO PLAYED AT JFK’S WHITE HOUSE. HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT AND WHAT HAPPENED?
I have to go back to the origin my sextet, which was at the end of my college years in Chicago. There was an intercollegiate jazz festival in Washington that we entered and won, getting a recording contract with Columbia Records. That was beyond our wildest dreams; we didn’t even know anyone who made a record. We were just students
The prospect from winning and having an album, and the promise of (producer) John Hammond encouraged us to approach the State Department about sending us on a Good Will Tour as a sort of unofficial student jazz group. We were three blacks and three whites, at a time when civil rights was the primary issue in our culture, during the early years of the Kennedy Administration. We suggested that we play universities and do seminars with the students about jazz. I was quite a crusader for jazz back then.
The famous groups that they were sending out probably didn’t do that. Just a few years before in 1956 there was a cultural exchange program, and they sent Dizzy (Gillespie)’s band to the Middle East, Louis Armstrong to Africa, and Benny (Goodman) to Russia.
We just thought that this was just a crazy pipe dream, but the State Department sent us back a form letter that said “send an audition tape which will be reviewed by our jazz panel”. They had a jazz panel, classical panel and a dance panel.
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“The point is that you have absolutely no competition; nobody else can sound like you as well as you can”
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We cobbled together $60 and went to Boulevard Recording in Chicago. We’d never been in a recording studio before. We recorded six pieces , sent them a tape in July or August and then just forgot about it.
In October, we got a letter from the State Department saying “we’re going to send you to Latin America for six months, to play in 23 countries”. We couldn’t ever have dreamed of that.
So, from February to July on ’62, we toured all of Latin America, except Cuba, and played 161 concerts. It was tremendously successfully, because the people in those countries love rhythmic music, and in many places they had never even heard of jazz. Or even seen a saxophone!
Cochabama, Bolivia where you have 5,000 barefoot Indians in the village plaza went nuts because they loved rhythmic music, and that we had black players. The propaganda about the US was not friendly in those years, especially about civil rights.
The State Department people, after the concerts, would send a host from the embassy, and they often said “you guys did more in one night than we could do in a year, because everything that we do is considered propaganda”. So, it worked very well.
The success of that tour led to an invitation to play at the White House. It came from Jackie Kennedy, who had a series of concerts called “Concerts For Young People, By Young People”. They had all been classical up until then. They figured, “Let’s just include a jazz group”, which was daring at the time, because jazz at that time was not welcomed in many or proper circles.
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“from February to July on ’62, we toured all of Latin America, except Cuba, and played 161 concerts. It was tremendously successfully, because the people in those countries love rhythmic music, and in many places they had never even heard of jazz. Or even seen a saxophone!”
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WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT THINK OF THE CONCERT?
It was not for JFK; he was not there. China had invaded India that morning, so he was busy down the hall (chuckles). Supposedly, he could hear it from the East Room, but it was well received. It turned out totally by chance that it was the first jazz concert at the White House. Some journalist did some research and found that out, so we got a lot of publicity for that.
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“It turned out totally by chance that it was the first jazz concert at the White House”
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HAVE YOU EVER LISTENED BACK TO THAT ALBUM TO HEAR WHAT A YOUNG PAUL WINTER PLAYED LIKE?
Oh, yeah. In 2012, we did a 50 year anniversary anthology of our early Columbia albums from the 1960s. Included for the first time were the recordings from The White House. They had never been released, and it was called Count Me In.
It was a good little band that we had
THAT LATIN AMERICA TOUR CHANGED THE TRAJECTORY OF YOUR PLAYING, AND ULTIMATELY YOUR CAREER
Bossa Nova was blossoming in Brazil back then. It began in ’59.
The night before we left for our State Department tour in Chicago, our manager, Gene Lees (who had been the editor of Downbeat magazine) played for us Joao Gilberto’s first album, called Chega De Saudade, and we were absolutely mesmerized. That was the seed for a big shift for me.
I was amazed that you could have a gentle music that was also as soulful as the jazz that I loved most, and had beautiful chord changes. It was exquisitely beautiful.
It was five months before we got to Brazil, because we went down the West Coast of South America, and then started up from Argentina, finally arriving in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We heard a lot of bossa nova then, of course. We met various players in Rio, and Columbia wanted us to record a bossa nova album while we were down there. We did our first session there.
This is what happens when you travel. Your world expands. Learning is what we’re here to do
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“This is what happens when you travel. Your world expands. Learning is what we’re here to do”
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YOUR PIANIST WAS ASSOCIATED WITH BILL EVANS. DID YOU EVER PLAY WITH HIM?
I never played with Bill Evans; our pianist Warren Bernhardt, roomed with Bill after we came back to New York in the fall of ’62.
The only thing I ever played with Bill was pool. (laughs)
We were in Daytona Beach in the spring of ’63, and Bill was down there drying out. He had already lived with Warren for awhile, so we all shot pool together one night. That was the only time I met Bill.
YOU’VE HAD SOME IMPRESSIVE MUSICIANS IN YOUR BANDS, SUCH AS WALCOTT, MCCANDLESS AND TOWNER, TO NAME A FEW. WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A MUSICIAN FOR YOUR BANDS?
I look for people who not only have talent, but are great to be with. It’s no fun to be on the road with a prima donna (chuckles)
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“I look for people who not only have talent, but are great to be with. It’s no fun to be on the road with a prima donna”
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WAS IT DIFFICULT TO LET THOSE THREE GO TO FORM THE BAND OREGON, OR WAS IT AN ARTISTIC DECISION YOU WERE COMFORTABLE WITH?
It was a gradual divergence, musically, not personally. We were all great friends, and still are.
When people are in a group together, and especially if you’re touring and travelling a lot, it’s an intense learning experience. It’s like a condensed university course.
Everyone grows, and we all don’t grow in the same direction because we have different natures.
The Consort was conceived as this balance between ensemble and soloing, and when you have great soloists, they often want to solo more than with the space that they get in an ensemble like ours.
That was the case here. You had amazing virtuosity with Paul McCandless, and Ralph (Towner) is a genius, as well as Colin. Ralph and Glenn (Moore) went to university together, so they were like a unit. They grew up and went to school in Oregon.
We were together for 2 ½ years. It was natural that they would start playing more as a quartet, which they did during the last few months. They had done a demo recording, and found a context for a deeper expression and a more improvised adventure than the Consort had. So, we knew after awhile that it was natural for them to go a different direction, and it felt right. They’ve been our “sister group” for these 40 something years.
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“I’ve been very blessed because I get to do the thing that I love so much, which is to make music and to play with other people. I’ve also got two kids and a lovely wife; I don’t know how much luckier I can be”
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WHAT FUTURE GOALS DO YOU HAVE?
I’m working on a project called “Flyways” that is a musical chronical of the Great Bird Migration that goes from Southern Africa, up the Rift Valley, through the Middle East to Europe and Asia.
I call this migration “The Old World Migration”, because it goes through the Middle East. It is one of several of the great migrations on the planet, but it’s the one that embraces this particular slice of our globe. 300 or so species of birds, half a billion birds, make that journey up and down, twice a year.
I had a chance to fly in a glider with migrating storks over Israel. We were befriended when we played in Tel Aviv by a wonderful Israeli ornithologist, Yossi Leshem, who got his phd. Studying the migrating birds.
People don’t realize that Israel is in the bottleneck of the migration. It’s one of the great birding places on earth.
Yossi came back afterwards and asked if we wanted to see a video of the migrating birds. He said “Maybe you can do something with them like you have done with the wolves and the whales”.
So he invited us to come back and play the next year, on Passover, for his organization, called The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, which is like our Audubon Society.
He met us at the airport, and he said “I’ve got a band to take down to the canyon in the Negev Desert, but I’m going to take you a different way”.
He took me to Galilee Airport, and put me into a two seat glider, piloted by a former Air Force pilot. We soared up amongst the migrating storks, who were soaring slowly.
We turned off the motor and just soared with them for a long time. It was unbelievable.
WHAT GIVES YOU THE MOST JOY?
When you have music and you have kids, it’s hard to choose one over the other.
When people ask what your favorite music is,” it’s the music that I’m listening to and playing now”
I’ve been very blessed because I get to do the thing that I love so much, which is to make music and to play with other people. I’ve also got two kids and a lovely wife; I don’t know how much luckier I can be
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“When people ask what your favorite music is, ‘it’s the music that I’m listening to and playing now’.”
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WHO HAS IMPARTED A PHILOSPHY OR TEACHING THAT HAS MOTIVATED YOU DURING YOUR LIFE?
I could chronicle the mentors that I’ve had since I was a kid, including my mother, my dad and older sister. Also my first sax teacher, John Monty, a wonderful Sicilian, my piano teacher whom I studied with for ten years when I was seven, Alma Lichti, a German lady.
This was in Altoona, a railroad town in Pennsylvania, that had many immigrants and many European cultures brought in by the railroad. It was the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad shops, so there was a lot of culture in my town. Joe Allard was there.
And with all of these people they had one thing in common: Respect was their middle name. They were always encouraging me and others to go forth in the world and do something worthwhile.
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“And with all of these they people had one thing in common: Respect was their middle name”
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I can’t point to one. It certainly hasn’t been a religion, and philosophy bores me to tears. (chuckles)
HOW ABOUT A COUPLE OF BOOKS THAT YOU’VE READ THAT YOU WISH EVERYONE WOULD READ, MAYBE BECAUSE THEY’VE HELPED MAKE YOU WHO YOU ARE?
I can’t say that these books have made me what I am, but they are books that I love. I f I wanted to tell you about some great African or Brazilian pianist, it would be like that, but they don’t ‘make’ me.
I think a book that everyone should read is Breath by James Nestor. It’s the most basic thing that we do , and most people do it very poorly.
Probably the most inspiring book I’ve ever read is The Universe Is A Green Dragon by Brian Swimme. It’s the story of a relationship with the universe
I just read the biography of John Wesley Powell, the man who was the first to go through the Grand Canyon in the mid-19th Century. It’s a wonderful story of that century, and the people who were questing and felt the extraordinary promise of this amazing garden called America.
His people came from England, and it’s an interesting chronical of our attempt to liberate ourselves from religion, and find out what perhaps the land had to teach us.
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“(A master) never tried to coast and think ‘I’ve got it all together so I don’t keep on the quest’.”
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HAVING SAID THAT, WHO IN WORLD HISTORY WOULD YOU LIKE TO SIT DOWN FOR AN EVENING AND PICK HIS OR HER BRAIN?
What a fun question!
I suppose Charles Ives. He was an extraordinary musician, and was somebody who heard way beyond the boxes of art and entertainment. His music was organically connected to life.
HOW ABOUT WHAT MUSICIAN LIVING OR DEAD WOULD YOU PAY $1000 TO SEE PERFORM?
(laughs) That’s great!
I would pay that much to see Stan Getz.
He had sound and melody in his being. His dna was pure melody. He, like Paul Desmond, was incapable of playing anything that wasn’t melodic. If either of those guys played two notes, you knew that a human being was singing
COLTRANE SAID THAT EVERYONE WANTS TO SOUND LIKE STAN GETZ
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“(Stan Getz) had sound and melody in his being. His dna was pure melody. He, like Paul Desmond, was incapable of playing anything that wasn’t melodic. If either of those guys played two notes, you knew that a human being was singing”
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And today everyone wants to sound like Coltrane. Sound like yourself. That’s the point.
In our sound play workshops I try to impress on people that what the world really wants from you is your song, in whatever way you put it forth. People don’t want you to necessarily sound like Sinatra or Yasha Heifitz or Coltrane, because they’ve already been handled.
The point is that you have absolutely no competition; nobody else can sound like you as well as you can.
To get people off the track of too much imitating. We all imitate and borrow, of course.
But as you grow, it’s fun to look for what the aspects are of my own unique and wondrous combination of elements that could be shared with people
There have been so many great musicians in our cultural pantheon. There’s never been a country in history that has had a diversity of musical expression that has come even just through jazz, not to mention other aspects.
I think that the jazz heritage is the most remarkable and unique thing about the American journey musically.
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“I think that the jazz heritage is the most remarkable and unique thing about the American journey musically”
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PART OF THE JAZZ HERITAGE HAS ALWAYS BEEN TO INTERPRET ONE’S SURROUNDINGS. ORIGINALLY, THE ‘BEAT’ OF JAZZ REFLECTED THE MARCHING OF A BAND, LATER ON THE CHURNING OF THE RAILROAD TRACKS AND THEN THE FRENETIC PACE OF THE RACING CAR. PAUL WINTER HAS TAKEN THE LOGICAL STEP AND BROUGHT IN THE SOUNDS OF GOD’S CREATED EARTH TO SERVE AS A STARTING POINT FOR MELODY AND INSPIRATION. IT’S A SONGBOOK THAT HAS BEEN USEFULL FOR OUR EARS SINCE THE GARDEN OF EDEN, AND IT STILL SERVES US WELL TODAY.