Paul Winter is a name familiar to most jazz and world music aficionados as a saxophonist, musician and composer across a variety of genres, and also as a dedicated environmentalist. Beginning his career on piano and clarinet, Winter became enamored of the saxophone while still in grade school. In 1961 was signed by Columbia Records after his band won the Intercollegiate Jazz Festival, and in 1968 he had a musical epiphany when he first heard whale songs. As The Musical World of Paul Winter notes, “he was deeply moved. The whales’ voices seemed to express to me something of the soul of the Earth.” In 1967 he had the idea of a musical ensemble patterned after an English Elizabethan-era consort, and the first Paul Winter Consort was born, a concept that Winter continues.
Author, pianist and composer Bob Gluck is a professor emeritus of music at SUNY Albany, New York, and his previous books include You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band, The Miles Davis “Lost” Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, and Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words. He is a composer in his own right.
In The Musical World of Paul Winter (Terra Nova Editions, 2025), Gluck chronicles seven-time Grammy winner Paul Winter’s life, music and accomplishments in an easy to read yet in-depth style. The book contains numerous interviews with fellow musicians and colleagues, descriptions of albums and important concerts and events in Winter’s career, and takes a deep look at Winter’s love of music and his concerns for our fellow Earth creatures and environmental causes.
Winter’s initial recording career was heavily influenced by bossa nova, and he lived in Brazil for several periods of time during the 1960s. With the advent of the Paul Winter Consort, he expanded his musical palette to include a greater variety of influences outside of jazz, and instruments like woodwinds, strings, guitars and percussion. The Consort can be considered an early pioneer of world music. The group made room for improvisation and individual musical expression. His song “Icarus” from the 1972 album of the same name, produced by George Martin, is a landmark of the genre. Over the years the Paul Winter Consort has featured a number of virtuoso players like Paul McCandless, Eugene Friesen, David Darling, Gene Bertoncini, Ralph Towner, Colin Walcott, Susan Osborn, and many others.
Paul Winter. Courtesy of Anthony Pepitone.
While 1978’s Common Ground was the first of Winter’s albums to include the sounds of whales, birds, and wolves, which became a strong influence on his music. Gluck quotes New Sounds host John Schaefer as saying: “Paul was the first to make animal voices part of his ensemble, in the same way human instruments are. Some see Winter as a kind of musical shaman, a shape-shifter who can make his own instrument sound almost feral. A timber wolf, a Weddell seal, even a killer whale, many of whose calls, he points out, ‘are naturally within the top range of the sax.’” Gluck notes that Winter had first heard humpback whale recordings at a 1969 lecture by Roger Payne, discoverer of humpback whale songs, and Winter had said: “it made me realize that there is perhaps a universal yearning in all species, this calling, crying quality to their singing and awakened me to the crisis of what we’re doing to the Earth in a way that I had not been aware [of] before. And that became another part of my life’s mission. Afterward, I felt as if I had joined this larger fraternity of beings, this bigger symphony of life.” It’s little wonder that Paul Winter became strongly involved in environmentalism.
You can certainly hear that this feeling informs Winter’s music. It has a flowing ease, a sense of naturalness that envelops the listener. For me, it seems to be borne from some elemental source.
As the book unfolds, we see Paul Winter’s decades-long career continuing to thrive, encompassing events like his annual Winter Solstice celebration, more than 50 albums, his Living Music record label, his participation in concerts like 2023’s “This Glorious Earth” to raise environmental awareness, and very much more.
Perhaps most significantly, Bob Gluck illuminates the philosophy underlying Winter’s music and commitment. He quotes Winter in a 1990 interview: “The power of aliveness is the most precious thing…if you can find the power of what sparks that aliveness in you, whether it’s picking the horn up and finding one note that you love, or playing something you love, or playing with other instruments you love, that’s the thing to keep alive. Technique and all that is useless if there isn’t that love in it.”
Bob Gluck writes with not just an admiration but a fondness for Paul Winter’s music. Reading The Musical World of Paul Winter will inspire you to delve more deeply into it.
