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Krueger Fine Arts Series - Paul Winter

Award-winning saxophonist, bandleader, composer, explorer of the world's musical traditions and founder of Living Music and the Paul Winter Consort, Paul Winter will perform as part of Lakeland College's Krueger Fine Arts Series on Thursday, Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m.
 
Tickets for the concert, which will be in Lakeland's Bradley Fine Arts Building, are $20 for adults, $10 for non-Lakeland students.
 
Winter, the winner of four Grammy awards and a Grammy nominee six times, has been motivated for the past 30 years by the vision of a musical-ecological community, and has followed a steady course towards his unique "Earth Music," a celebration of the creatures and cultures of the earth.

Winter's musical realm has long embraced the traditions of many of the world's cultures, interweaving widely diverse instruments and elements with the extraordinary voices from what he refers to as "the greater symphony of the Earth", including wolves, whales, eagles, and several dozen other species of 'wilderness musicians'.
 
His concert tours and recording expeditions have taken him to 37 countries and to wilderness areas on six continents, into which he has traveled on rafts, mules, dog sleds, horses, kayaks, sailboats, steamers, tug-boats and Land Rovers.

At Northwestern University in Chicago, Winter formed a jazz sextet, which won the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival and was signed to a contract with Columbia Records. In 1962, the Paul Winter Sextet was sent by the U.S. State Department on a six-month tour of 23 countries of Latin America. The Sextet became one of the first groups to assimilate the syncopations of Brazil's bossa nova into its sound and became the first jazz group to officially perform at the White House.

 Brazil became a second home for Paul in the mid-'60s where he recorded several albums. Brazilian guitar, Afro-Brazilian percussion and the symphonic music of Villa-Lobos inspired the aural-vision of the new ensemble he would call the Paul Winter Consort. Launched in 1967, the Consort became the forum for the whole world of diverse music which Winter loved.

Hearing the songs of humpback whales for the first time in 1968 further expanded Winter's concept of a musical community. The haunting, bluesey communal celebration of a howling pack of wolves and the beautifully complex songs of the whales planted the seeds of ideas that blossomed on a number of Winter's later albums. The rich sound textures and special blend of the distinctive acoustic instrumental voices of Paul Winter and the Consort give Winter's Earth Music its unique and alluring quality; the recorded sounds from the natural world are interwoven with classical and ethnic traditions, the whole infused with the spontaneous spirit of jazz.

Winter's formation of Living Music Records in 1980 has created the recording forum for the exploration of this musical-ecological sound-vision, enabling the musicians to record their special Earth Music and reach the human community with their music of the wider earth community.

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