mals that features the voices of 13 species. Paul later released two albums inspired by his trips to the Grand Canyon, most notably the 1985 Grammy ®-nominated Canyon. He has traveled to at least 52 countries and wilderness areas on six continents for concert tours and recording expeditions. In 1971, The Apollo 15 astronauts carried a cassette copy of the Paul Winter Consort’ s live 1970 album, Road, to the moon and named two lunar craters after songs from the album:“ Icarus” and“ Ghost Beads.”
David: How did the presence of nature change the music you ' re making?
Paul: What I love the most is when I feel the music comes forth, especially when we ' re collectively improvising rather than just playing a written composition … and being outside opens up people in a wonderful way. Every night around the campfire, people would just tell stories. It was remarkable, because there were people who were fairly shy, and you could see them opening up. That encouraged me to do our Sound-
Play events outside. I had all these things in mind when I was looking for a place. Then I thought, well, let ' s see how creative it can be if I get my favorite musicians together, which I did in the summer of’ 77, and included composer William Allaudin Mathieu; Noel Paul Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary; and Laudir de Oliveira, a great Brazilian percussionist who was with Chicago. It was a very diverse group of people, and I thought, let ' s see what happens. For six weeks, I had people in and out of my home here in Litchfield all the time, people like Steve Gadd. I don ' t know if it changed specifically my playing, but it encouraged me a lot toward what we can do from shared expression.
Anastasia: You played with all these musicians out here. How did you take that next step of bringing nature into your music?
Paul: It’ s the same way that I became allured to different jazz players. As a kid, I loved unique sounds. I grew up with a lot of classical music around and played in a
symphony in high school. I respected it, but it was jazz players that had a soul in their voices. So, hearing a humpback whale was not really that different than hearing Charlie Parker for the first time. It ' s just expanding your community of voices.
David: Do you think about that when you encourage people to listen in a deeper way?
Paul: That ' s my goal. Every year, we do an event that returns to that quest. It ' s our summer solstice celebration, which we do at 4:30 in the morning, the first Saturday near the summer solstice. This year, it was right on the solstice. It’ s total darkness. It’ s the most profound event that we do. It ' s just 90 minutes of stream of music, no talking, no breaks, no lights. The whole nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which itself is a football field long, is cordoned off for yoga mats. So we have 65 yoga mat places, people lie down, and they listen. We start at 4:30 and by around 5:15, we all become aware that the stained glass windows are starting to illumi-
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