WED., JUNE 11, 2008
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eMusic Q&A: Paul Winter, Pt. 3
by Robert Phoenix
It’s such an archetypal recording for me. Looking back on what I would call the evolution of sacred/new age music I would list, Music For Zen Meditation by Tony Scott, Inside the Taj Mahal by Paul Horn and Icarus as the canonical titles for the genre, records that set the stage for the emergence of labels like ECM and Windham Hill. It’s an important record.
It’s interesting to look at it from your perspective, especially in conjunction with those two other recordings.
Can you talk a little bit about the prodigious talent that was in The Consort at the time, including the late Colin Walcott, Ralph Towner, Glen Moore and Paul McCandless?
During the three years that we were together, the four of them were doing gigs on their own. During the summer of 1970 there was a fellow in Burbank who did a little recording with them. They wanted to have a more open context for extended improvising. In the Consort, I was always seeking a balance between the composed and the improvised and they had a particular affinity for improvisation. I always thought it was great. By the time that we had toured heavily at that time, they just sort of graduated musically. I always encouraged people to really go for it. It was an entirely amicable transition. In fact, Paul McCandless is back playing with us. David Darling (cello) and I were the remaining members. In the middle years of the '70s there was a transitional group. We were searching at that time for something new, but I didn’t record anything for five years. I eventually created Common Ground which we took to A&M.
That was a visionary work, from both a recording perspective and an environmental one as well. How did you arrive at your state of awareness and what kind of epiphanies did you have in the recording experience of Common Ground?
Well, it’s interesting to look back at the number of threads that came together on a project like that. I had heard the whales in 1968 and was very intrigued with their voices and intelligence that underlayed their songs, repeated again and again. We explored different ways to bring the voices of the whales to people in the songs, much in the same way that we brought English horn and cello, etc into the music. We tried a number of approaches, using the voices of the whales and other endangered species, in fact we even included them into a piece called, “Wildness Is the Preservation of the World” which we took to George Martin in 1971. He didn’t feel that the piece was strong enough for the album and he was right.
Where did you go from there?
In 1973 we played a benefit for Greenpeace in Vancouver. After the concert, the Greenpeace guys asked me if I would like to come out with them on a boat to view the whales. I leapt at the chance. They put a photographer and me down into a zodiac and went down to where the Grey whales were feeding and we saw diving, surfacing and blowing. Sitting next to these huge creatures in a raft was an epiphany. What struck me was the slow motion and grace as they went up and down in the water. I then I had the idea that the most significant way that we could honor the whales in their 30,000,000 year tradition was to actually take a melody from a whale song and use it as a seed theme for our piece. I had then become a good friend of Roger Payne who had recorded a number of whales and he had really opened the door for to what I call, “the greater symphony of The Earth.” Roger loaned me quite a few tapes of the whales and I spent many hours listening to them. I found one passage that I could play on soprano sax. There were eight pitches that I could fit on our human scale. Most whale singing is in swoops and they don’t land on the stair steps of pitches that we use. But in this case there were notes that did. So I harmonized that melody for the guitar. That became the first piece that made sense.
To find out about Winter's work with wolves, click here.
It’s interesting to look at it from your perspective, especially in conjunction with those two other recordings.
Can you talk a little bit about the prodigious talent that was in The Consort at the time, including the late Colin Walcott, Ralph Towner, Glen Moore and Paul McCandless?
During the three years that we were together, the four of them were doing gigs on their own. During the summer of 1970 there was a fellow in Burbank who did a little recording with them. They wanted to have a more open context for extended improvising. In the Consort, I was always seeking a balance between the composed and the improvised and they had a particular affinity for improvisation. I always thought it was great. By the time that we had toured heavily at that time, they just sort of graduated musically. I always encouraged people to really go for it. It was an entirely amicable transition. In fact, Paul McCandless is back playing with us. David Darling (cello) and I were the remaining members. In the middle years of the '70s there was a transitional group. We were searching at that time for something new, but I didn’t record anything for five years. I eventually created Common Ground which we took to A&M.
That was a visionary work, from both a recording perspective and an environmental one as well. How did you arrive at your state of awareness and what kind of epiphanies did you have in the recording experience of Common Ground?
Well, it’s interesting to look back at the number of threads that came together on a project like that. I had heard the whales in 1968 and was very intrigued with their voices and intelligence that underlayed their songs, repeated again and again. We explored different ways to bring the voices of the whales to people in the songs, much in the same way that we brought English horn and cello, etc into the music. We tried a number of approaches, using the voices of the whales and other endangered species, in fact we even included them into a piece called, “Wildness Is the Preservation of the World” which we took to George Martin in 1971. He didn’t feel that the piece was strong enough for the album and he was right.
Where did you go from there?
In 1973 we played a benefit for Greenpeace in Vancouver. After the concert, the Greenpeace guys asked me if I would like to come out with them on a boat to view the whales. I leapt at the chance. They put a photographer and me down into a zodiac and went down to where the Grey whales were feeding and we saw diving, surfacing and blowing. Sitting next to these huge creatures in a raft was an epiphany. What struck me was the slow motion and grace as they went up and down in the water. I then I had the idea that the most significant way that we could honor the whales in their 30,000,000 year tradition was to actually take a melody from a whale song and use it as a seed theme for our piece. I had then become a good friend of Roger Payne who had recorded a number of whales and he had really opened the door for to what I call, “the greater symphony of The Earth.” Roger loaned me quite a few tapes of the whales and I spent many hours listening to them. I found one passage that I could play on soprano sax. There were eight pitches that I could fit on our human scale. Most whale singing is in swoops and they don’t land on the stair steps of pitches that we use. But in this case there were notes that did. So I harmonized that melody for the guitar. That became the first piece that made sense.
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