Paul Winter
b. 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.
Listen to Paul Winter
at Finetune.
Albums
- (1989) Common Ground
- (1972) Winter Consort - Icarus
Top Tracks
- Wolf Eyes
- Whole Earth Chant
- Common Ground
- Midnight
- The Silence Of A Candle
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