Paul Winter Consort performs 'This Glorious Earth!' on Labor Day in Saranac

Aug. 30—SARANAC — Today in Litchfield, Conn., a few of Paul Winter's friends will arrive for a "Summit Celebration" on his 84th birthday.

"We do this actually every six months, on my birthday and one of the other friends'," the seven-time Grammy Award winner said.

"We get together and try to figure out just what to do about the world. It's a very humble agenda."

SARANAC ESCAPE

Those in need of a respite from catastrophes and chaos, natural and man-made, can escape to a mown Saranac hayfield looking south to the high peaks of the Adirondacks on Labor Day and listen to the Paul Winter Consort's 'This Glorious Earth!," a unique blend of jazz, world, and classical music.

Presented by Hill and Hollow Music, the live-music event features the extraordinary composer, and bandleader, soprano saxophone; Theresa Thomason, voice; Dave Haughey, cello; Henrique Eisenmann, keyboard; Paul Meyers, guitar; Peter Slavov, bass; and Rogério Boccato, drums; plus (recorded) voices of Whale, Wolf, Wood Thrush.

"It's going to be a celebration of various creatures and various places on the planet that we've had some encounters with and we feel moved to celebrate," Winter said.

"It will be quite a diverse program, and there will be various creatures' voices that they'll hear. You mentioned the humpback whales, they will figure prominently in this."

'A SONG FOR ROGER'

Last weekend in Woodstock, Vt., Winter played at a memorial for his friend and collaborator, Roger Payne, (January 29, 1935 — June 10, 2023), a biologist and environmentalist who recorded humpback whale songs in 1967 and released "Songs of the Humpback Whale," a 1970 album.

"There's a piece that I wrote for Roger that features our cellist because Roger was a cellist as well as a biologist, and it's called 'A Song for Roger,'" Winter said.

"So, we'll be playing that along with another piece that came from an album that we did, Roger and I, did with Leonard Nimoy narrating. That came from the dialogue that Nimoy had with Roger to get the whale recordings for Star Trek IV.

"In the future centuries, the whales are summoned to time travel back to save humanity. In thanks for Roger letting him use the recordings of the whales, Nimoy agreed to narrate the poetry on this album. So, we're doing a piece from that called 'The Voyage Home.'"

'GREATER SYMPHONY OF THE EARTH'

Lectures on whales and wolves and other aural encounters expanded Winter's repertoire.

"We will celebrate the wolf as well and the wood thrush and the winter wren and a number of other creatures as well as music from Brazil, which is kind of a second home for me," he said.

"Two of the principal members of the consort are Brazilian, the pianist and drummer. The member of our ensemble that most often lifts the roof wherever we're playing is Theresa Thomason, an extraordinary singer who I think is the greatest yet-to-be-discovered vocalist on the planet."

Winter and Thomason met 25 years ago at the consort's annual winter solstice celebration at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

A member of the Lindisfarne Association, Winter was asked by the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, to become artist-in-residence there.

"A friend recommended that we invite Theresa to sing at one of these solstices, and she just knocked our socks off so she has been doing our principal events ever since," Winter said.

ROAD TAKEN

Born in Altoona, Pa., Winter's music instrumentation progressed from piano to clarinet to saxophone.

He and his sister, Diane, performed as The Winter Kids at the instigation of their mother, Beulah.

"What 7-year-old kid thinks about going out and playing for the Rotary Club?" he said.

"In a town like Altoona in the 1940s, there was music of all kinds, just all sorts of music, which I think that was true of many towns then. That was before we had mass media. People had local culture.

"You made your own music. There was just music everywhere. It wasn't something that anybody thought was a proper thing to do for a livelihood. That was not in the cards at all."

ROAD TAKEN

But when Fate intersected with good luck (Winter's sextet won the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival, received a Columbia Records deal, and a U.S. State Department six-month tour to 23 Latin America countries), he sidelined his University of Virginia law school aspirations and never looked back.

"I feel that much gratitude about it, the good luck I've had," he said.

"They (his parents, Paul Sr. and Beulah) didn't program my sister and I, in a way. They really wanted us to do what we felt strongly about.

"Jazz in those days was not the most respectable of fields of endeavor. It was associated with lots of drugs, nightclubs. It was kind of an underground genre. We tried to be as respectable as we could.

"It was lucky to get this State Department tour, which I think had a lot to do with the fact that we were a perfectly integrated band. There were three blacks and three whites."

"It was at the time in the early years of the Kennedy Administration when civil rights was a big issue in our country."

The State Department deployed famous jazz groups as goodwill ambassadors — Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie.

"We suggested they send us as a student group, and then we would get to play at universities in other countries," Winter said.

"It was amazing that they accepted the idea. What was interesting after that, among other things, we got an invitation (Nov. 19, 1962) to play at the White House. My parents came to that concert in the East Room of the White House.

"I think after that that any objection they might have had to me making music was forgotten."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell