And we sit there, listening to this beautiful piece of music called“ The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush” from Horn of Plenty. Afterwards, I turn to the liner notes for the piece and read the listed artists: Wood Thrush: vocal; Paul Winter: soprano sax; Eugene Friesen: cello; Henrique Eisenmann: fortepiano; Peter Slavov: bass; and Rogerio Boccato: drums. The composers of this song? Wood Thrush, J. S. Bach, and Paul Winter. The description of the piece ends with this:“ I had this fantasy that ol’ J. S. and the Wood Thrush stumble into a little Brazilian party, and a good time is had by all.” With a half-eaten muffin in my one hand and a notebook in my other, recorder resting on the arm of my chair, we begin the interview.
Anastasia: Why did you choose this location to make it your home?
Paul: I’ m from Altoona, a small railroad city in the middle of Pennsylvania. After that, I was in school in Chicago, and then I came to New York for three years and got out as quickly as I could. I drove to Weston, Connecticut, to visit Dave Brubeck. When I drove up in my car, Dave was out in the front yard putting up a snow fence for his little child. My jazz sextet had played in a couple festivals with the Brubeck Quartet the previous summer, so I knew him just a little bit. He was very cordial, and we talked for a half hour. He said,“ I do about 100 concerts a year, and most of them I can drive to from here,” and I saw my future in that sentence. That was 1963. In’ 65, I came out to Weston and found a cottage in the woods where I lived for two years. I came up to Redding, Connecticut, one time to visit Mary Travers, who was a friend because my first band had toured with Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved it because it was a much more rural area. The day I moved into a cottage on a farm there, my landlady said,“ Oh yeah, there was another musician who used to live on this road. His name was Charles Ives.” For seven years, I jogged every day past the mailbox that said“ Ives.”
David: You just played this beautiful piece of music combining Bach, Brazilian vibe, and this special wood thrush. Do you think Bach and Brazilian music have any special connection to nature?
Paul: A knee-jerk answer would be no more than any other music. But then, I think about what I love about each of these genres. The forms in Bach and the journey he makes harmonically have a kinship to forms in nature. In that sense, I would say that there ' s a great kinship between the profound intelligence in the universe and Bach. In Brazil, people live much more in nature. Their emotions are much more out there than we Northerners. There is a great deal more joy happening in their lives.
David: You first went to Brazil in the 1960s, sent by the State Department, which used to send jazz musicians around the world. Had you thought much about Brazilian music before you went?
Paul: Not until the night before the trip. Gene Lees, who was editor of DownBeat, was coming with us on our six-month State Department tour. The night before we left, Gene played us an album called Chega de Saudade by João Gilberto, a great singer, and we were completely beguiled. We had never heard anything like that. I was 21, and the music I loved at the time was brash bebop jazz. And there was this gentle music that had seemed to have an equivalent amount of soul as the hard-driving music, but it was very subtle, with beautiful harmonic motion. That was January 31, 1962, and we weren ' t going to hit Brazil until June, after having to go through Central America and down the West Coast of South America and coming up from Argentina and Uruguay into Brazil finally. So for five months, we just couldn ' t wait to get to Brazil.
Paul was drawn to return to Brazil in 1964 because of the music. That’ s when the idea of a consort began formulating, a term borrowed from ensembles of Shakespeare’ s day. Since its beginning, the Paul Winter Consort has had the core instrumentation of cello, English horn / oboe, alto or soprano sax, classical guitar or piano, acoustic bass, and a vast variety of percussion. In 1968, Paul began introducing free improvisation into the Consort ' s concerts as a way for the group to truly loosen up and explore. The band performs one " free piece " with all the lights turned out in most every concert.
David: Why did you decide jazz was not your world when you were doing so well with it?
Paul: It was a series of things. My sextet was really a partnership between me and a trumpet player named Dick Witzel, who was a couple years older than me, and whom I met the first month I was at college at Northwestern. He became my best friend, my partner in this group, and he was my mentor for jazz. We didn ' t know much beyond Stan Kenton ' s band and Benny Goodman.
The Paul Winter Sextet emerged in Chicago during Paul’ s years at Northwestern University. After winning the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival, the band was signed to Columbia Records by legendary producer John Hammond. In 1962 the sextet recorded its first three albums, and, on recommendation from festival judges Dizzy Gillespie and Hammond, was sent by the State Department on a six-month tour of 23 countries of Latin America.
Paul: We had a successful State Department tour, but nobody back home knew about it. The one place that did was the White House, where I had written a letter to JFK in the middle of our tour, saying that this was a great idea to send a student jazz group out. I wrote that the tour was going very, very well and saluted him for what the cultural exchange program was doing. That August, we got an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to play at the White House in a
Paul Winter outside of his home in Litchfield, Connecticut.( Gregory Cherin)
36 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Holiday 2023 2025