WED., JUNE 11, 2008
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eMusic Q&A: Paul Winter, Pt. 2
by Robert Phoenix
Is that right around the same time you started your sextet?
That was the time when I did organize my first bebop sextet. We played dances and played as much jazz as we could get away with. That was also the time when they had these burgeoning college jazz festivals. There were two of them that were operative at the time, one at Georgetown and one at Notre Dame. In my senior year, our sextet won the intercollegiate one that was held at Georgetown. The judges were Dizzy Gillespie and John Hammond. John Hammond wound up signing us to Columbia, which wasn’t something that we would have dreamed of at that point. We decided to take a year off before we all went off to our various graduate schools and give it a shot.
Did you record or tour?
Well during that year, we wrote to the State Department and suggested that they send us on a goodwill tour to Russia. We were a perfectly integrated group of three black and three white musicians during a time when civil rights was a major issue. Somehow, the ambience of our band resonated with that of the new frontiers that Kennedy had launched. The state department wrote back and said that they were going to send us to Latin America for six months. That really exploded our realities, hearing all kinds of music, especially hearing the music of Brazil. We played 13 cities in Brazil in one month, during a time when Bossa Nova was just blossoming there; we were intrigued with that music — as well as other types of Brazilian music. I moved there for a year in the mid '60s where I was imagining a new kind of ensemble that embraced a broader world then just jazz. Out of that came the first Consort. The first ensemble that I called The Consort began touring and recording in 1968. The Consort signed with A&M in 1968, and we did three albums for A&M. The first one was called, The Winter Consort, the second, Something in the Wind and the third, Road was the album that the Apollo 15 flight took to The Moon and in fact named two craters after two of the pieces on the album.
Then there’s Icarus, the classic and defining album of not only your career but in the realm of new jazz, world music and what we would come to call new age, and it was produced by the famous, Sir George Martin! What role did he play in the recording?
A huge role. He came over for three weeks to Marblehead Mass, and his manager managed to convince him to come over for a vacation project. We rented cottages for he and his family on the beach. The band had their cottages and we moved all of the recording equipment into another rented house and played in the living room. During those three weeks we would spend the mornings at the beach and then show up at around 2pm to record into the night. It was a dream way of recording and I never wanted to go back into the studio again. I didn’t want the pressure of the clock and city. George was deeply involved in everything we recorded. It was also the first time that we used the studio in a creative context. It's needless to say that he was hugely creative in that way. In his autobiography he even stated that it was “the finest album” he ever made.
That’s high praise.
There was a kinship there with his own career as an oboist before he became a record producer. One of the things that intrigued him was that we had an oboe in our band.
To find out more about Winter's early whale experiments, click here.
That was the time when I did organize my first bebop sextet. We played dances and played as much jazz as we could get away with. That was also the time when they had these burgeoning college jazz festivals. There were two of them that were operative at the time, one at Georgetown and one at Notre Dame. In my senior year, our sextet won the intercollegiate one that was held at Georgetown. The judges were Dizzy Gillespie and John Hammond. John Hammond wound up signing us to Columbia, which wasn’t something that we would have dreamed of at that point. We decided to take a year off before we all went off to our various graduate schools and give it a shot.
Did you record or tour?
Well during that year, we wrote to the State Department and suggested that they send us on a goodwill tour to Russia. We were a perfectly integrated group of three black and three white musicians during a time when civil rights was a major issue. Somehow, the ambience of our band resonated with that of the new frontiers that Kennedy had launched. The state department wrote back and said that they were going to send us to Latin America for six months. That really exploded our realities, hearing all kinds of music, especially hearing the music of Brazil. We played 13 cities in Brazil in one month, during a time when Bossa Nova was just blossoming there; we were intrigued with that music — as well as other types of Brazilian music. I moved there for a year in the mid '60s where I was imagining a new kind of ensemble that embraced a broader world then just jazz. Out of that came the first Consort. The first ensemble that I called The Consort began touring and recording in 1968. The Consort signed with A&M in 1968, and we did three albums for A&M. The first one was called, The Winter Consort, the second, Something in the Wind and the third, Road was the album that the Apollo 15 flight took to The Moon and in fact named two craters after two of the pieces on the album.
Then there’s Icarus, the classic and defining album of not only your career but in the realm of new jazz, world music and what we would come to call new age, and it was produced by the famous, Sir George Martin! What role did he play in the recording?
A huge role. He came over for three weeks to Marblehead Mass, and his manager managed to convince him to come over for a vacation project. We rented cottages for he and his family on the beach. The band had their cottages and we moved all of the recording equipment into another rented house and played in the living room. During those three weeks we would spend the mornings at the beach and then show up at around 2pm to record into the night. It was a dream way of recording and I never wanted to go back into the studio again. I didn’t want the pressure of the clock and city. George was deeply involved in everything we recorded. It was also the first time that we used the studio in a creative context. It's needless to say that he was hugely creative in that way. In his autobiography he even stated that it was “the finest album” he ever made.
That’s high praise.
There was a kinship there with his own career as an oboist before he became a record producer. One of the things that intrigued him was that we had an oboe in our band.
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