series of concerts called Concerts for Young People by Young People. It was only classical music, but because our group had been so successful in Latin America, they thought, well, let ' s take a chance on a jazz group. Jazz was very much an underground thing then. They had only invited famous groups before that. So, we played the White House in November of’ 62, and the next morning, the news of the concert was on the front page across the country:“ Jackie Digs Jazz.” From the publicity of that, we got a tour of clubs around the country.
Anastasia: Who was in the group?
Paul: Dick Witzel on trumpet. Warren Bernhardt on piano. Richard Evans, bass player. Harold Jones, drummer who, after that, went with Count Basie for 15 years. He just finished about 20 years with Tony Bennett before Tony passed. One of the last gigs that we played was at Newport in the summer of’ 63. We were driving home, and Dick said,“ I ' m going to quit music and go to medical school,” because his dad and brother were doctors. We did our last album that fall, which was a celebration of jazz impressions of folk songs. It was at the time of JFK’ s assassination, and that completely burst our bubble. I mean, we had been living in an absolute, well, you could say a dream world. Imagine, you ' re 23 and your president is JFK, and the Peace Corps has just started, and we ' re reaching out to the world. What an encouraging spirit for a kid to have, and then all of a sudden, it ' s over. Without Dick, the group didn ' t make any sense to me anymore. I also was a little bit tired of a lot of the bebop that was going on and a lot of extended soloing that was developing. I loved ensemble music, and I had intended my sextet to be a miniature of a big band. It all shifted around from“ us” music to“ me” music. And so I was disillusioned with jazz, sick of New York City, and I had this strong allurement to go back
Paul Winter shaking Jacqueline Kennedy ' s hand as part of the Paul Winter Sextet at The White House, Washington, D. C., 1962.( Paul Winter Collection)
38 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Holiday 2023 2025 to Brazil. It was in Brazil that I first heard Villa-Lobos’ s music, the classical music that features cello, and I thought, there ' s a wonderful instrument I ' d never paid attention to before.
David: When did you start thinking that nature had something to teach us musically?
Paul: Hearing the humpback whales on May 27, 1968. Roger Payne, who is celebrated in one of the pieces in my new album, recorded the humpback whales for the album Song of the Humpback Whale, released
in 1970. Two years before the album came out, I went to a lecture with him and was completely astounded. Here were these beautiful voices, these beguiling voices that were swooping all over the place, going off the top end, the bottom end of our hearing. And then Roger pointed out that he and Scott McVay had discovered that the whales are repeating these songs, sometimes lasting 30 minutes, as possibly complex as a Beethoven symphony. Here was a creature with an intelligence that nobody had really understood before. The capper at the end was that they were being exterminated quickly to squeeze the last drops out of a dying industry of whaling. I became an activist that night.
David: When Song of the Humpback Whale came out, no one could expect how popular it would be. And then Scott McVay took this record album to Japan, played it for whaling executives, and some burst into tears. It got the world to care. Paul, were you already thinking about a consort, this ensemble that lives together in the countryside and makes music together?
Paul: Part of the influence was when Gary Snyder told me that he was tired of traveling and was going to start doing his workshops at his place in the mountains, in the Sierra Nevada, so that people could experience how to chop wood and carry water. I thought instead of traveling all the time to do my workshops, I ' d like to have a place to do them. I came here in’ 75 and did the first gathering in’ 77, which was the one where we did the Common Ground album. I ' ll tell you also what it was, and again it was whales. In November’ 76, Governor Jerry Brown hosted a three-day conclave called“ California Celebrates the Whale” in Sacramento. Out of that came two interesting things: One was that people got together socially, between all the performances and presentations. There was a campaign called“ Boycott Japan” because of their whaling. In California, that was awaking a lot of memories of the internment in the’ 40s. People were saying,“ Hey, that ' s not the way you transform people. You don ' t boycott them. Let ' s go and share what we know about the whales.” It was an amazing idea whose time had come, and it kept growing. The next Easter in’ 77, I was on a plane full of California folks, including Jerry Brown and Jackson Browne, Wavy Gravy, Joni Mitchell, Mimi Fariña, and our group. That’ s where I met Scott McVay, on the airplane. We were on our way to a seven-day conclave called“ Japan Celebrates the Whale and Dolphin” in a dome in Tokyo. It was the first environmental event in Tokyo. We played concerts six nights in a row, and there were talks. A filmmaker named Will Janis who was there wanted to make a film about people interacting with whales in Baja, California, where the great whales come to mate and calve in the wintertime. So he organized a trip there for the next February and invited us to come.
Paul began developing his SoundPlay approach in 1971 as a result of the Consort’ s collective improvising. He conducted hundreds of Sound- Play workshops at music schools, universities, and retreat centers. He led music-making whale-watching expeditions to Baja, California, setting up camp in the dunes along Magdalena Bay, the wintertime habitat of grey whales. This inspired his album Callings, a celebration of sea mam-