The Paul Winter Consort (Above photo)

One Who Sings of Life:
An Interview with Paul Winter

As part of the Shumei Arts Council of America’s participation in Pasadena’s Tender Land Festival, the acclaimed saxophonist and composer, Paul Winter, performed his “Greater Symphony of the Earth.” The concert took place at Shumei Hall, Pasadena, on November 14, 2004.
  The Grammy-winning Mr. Winter is one of the pioneers of world music. During his solo performance at Shumei Hall he played music and told stories of his adventures in the traditional cultures and wilderness areas of six continents. He was accompanied by recordings of various instruments and notable voices, among them those of wolves, humpbacked whales, and the song of the Amazonian rainforest’s elusive uirapuru.
  To learn more about the Tender Land Festival and the Shumei Arts Council of America, please visit shumeiarts.org.
George Bedell conducted this interview on November 13, 2004.

SM: You were fortunate to come from a musical family and receive early musical training. If you were to have planned your own musical education what would you retain of your background and what would you change?

PAUL WINTER: I have been so fortunate to be supported and nurtured by my parents. It is really hard to imagine it differently or be critical of it. But I suppose that in the two realms of freedom and discipline, I maybe had more of the latter as a little kid—more study, more discipline.

S.M: You would have preferred more freedom?

P.W: Having a child of my own now and looking at that whole issue very closely, I am very much leaning toward freedom with her and her journey. Maybe that is a little bit of a reaction to my own path. But more than that, it reflects what I have come to value as an adult music maker and how I like to guide other people toward discovering their own voice, their own path in life.

S.M: Freedom first and then discipline?

P.W: Yes, because each of us is unique and nature abhors uniformity. Nature demands diversity both among species and individuals. Each of us has a unique voice and unique path. Regardless of the path our parents might want us to follow, we each have something new to say. It is a very tricky balance. Certainly, you want to impart your best values to your child. Yet, you also want to give that child a context in which to explore and make choices.

S.M: Who were your childhood influences?

P.W: When I was seven, I studied clarinet with a man who was born in Sicily. He had a very Latin spirit and also played some jazz at the same time he taught classical clarinet. I also studied with a German lady who was very kind but very strict—very classical. She was the Apollonian; he was the Dionysian. 1 So, in a sense, I saw both sides of the fence as a kid as to the two different approaches within European and American music. As an adult, I have had the chance to explore broader worlds than existed in my little town in Pennsylvania. So, I was very lucky to have had that balance. If I were to make any slight adjustment, it would have been to have more opportunities to express myself freely.

S.M: As a child you started playing a variety of instruments, both percussion and wind, before settling on the saxophone. Did this exposure to a wide range of sounds open you up to the wide range of musical forms you would later embrace?

P.W: When you lived in Altoona, an isolated city in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, you were not near enough to any major city to have any interplay with them in terms of exposure to music. But there was great diversity of music where I grew up, marching bands, concert bands, German bands—oompah-pah music—, symphonic music, church music, and choral music. I heard all that. It was all part of the community and there was community participation. We are talking about the nineteen-forties. This was pre-television, before the age of monoculture, which unfortunately is where we are now. There was still diversity and local culture.
So, yes, playing those different instruments as a kid awakened in me love for different sounds.

S.M: After leaving your hometown, what led you to your exploration of world music?

P.W: The openness to world music was certainly sparked by jazz. Jazz has always been world music. It is a convergence of cultures, at first a convergence of African and European traditions. Jazz always had a very welcoming spirit. The jazz that I grew up with, New Orleans, Dixieland, and Swing, all was happy music—community music. It aspired to awaken enjoyment in people. It had a spirit of welcoming the listener and also other musicians. Jazz has always been open. Latin American influences started from at least the forties with Stan Kenton’s Band. 2 You had guitarists from Brazil and Cuban percussionists. Jazz has always said, “Hey, let’s play together. Let’s try something. Let’s explore.” To me, it was the quintessential American spirit.
In 1962, when I was 21, I went to Latin America and heard all the different traditions of the twenty-three countries that we visited. Exploring that music, playing with those musicians felt very natural to me because it was the way we played jazz, incorporating different instruments.

S.M: Your openness to the sound of various instruments also extends to an openness to the sounds of different cultures. Was it the jazz you played that led you to embrace the sounds of other cultures, or was this openness something innate in your own character from the very beginning?

P.W: I am very able to answer that question because of observing my daughter as she is growing. I think it is innate. If I had not seen that in her growing up, I might not have thought so. It is there in all of us. I think our natural inclination is to be open to others. I think it was in my nature as a kid. I also think that I went through the typical muting process that happens to kids when they are in school. I think I was drawn to music because of this muting.
My parents were quite serious about my sister and I, and also very serious about our education. Perhaps we were a little overly disciplined. And my response to that was to shut down a little. Which is a paradox because at the time I was involved in so many, many activities. I was certainly gregarious, but I was not very expressive emotionally. Music was my doorway to my own song as a person.
Sometimes I look at my own journey and say I have been able to do certain things because I had this kind of support. On the other hand, there are aspects of my own journey that have to do with a reaction to what I went through. Maybe this was the best of both worlds. I think that we need challenges in order to grow. So, to fashion the perfect childhood and upbringing for somebody else might be a bit of a disservice. It might be too protective. A life path is rarely easy for most people. I don’t know that it is meant to be smooth. But to create an illusion for our children that life is supposed to be totally smooth is maybe naive. For me, my shyness in terms of my own expression was one of the reasons that I was drawn so deeply to music. I had a deeper need. Had I not had that need, I might have gone on to law school.

S.M: Law school.

P.W: Yes, that is where I was headed.

S.M: You mention finding one’s own voice. Do you remember a particular moment at which you discovered your own voice?

P.W: I think that finding it is a lifelong quest. I am continually seeking it. Yes, I felt at times that I had found something of it, something of the reason I do what I do. Yet, there are other times I feel as if I have just begun to scratch the surface.
As a child I played music publicly and was applauded. I was precocious. I played earlier than most kids. So, when I was in grade school, the band director of the high school, who was also the Sicilian who taught me to play the clarinet, had me play in the high school band in their annual concert. I had a reaction to the adulation, the praise, a reaction to being special in some way. I really did not want to be special. I wanted to be just like the other kids. I wanted very much to belong, to be part of something. And so by the time I was twelve, having played for five years around all the fraternal organizations, Rotary Clubs, and church auxiliaries in our community, I did not want to go on a solo path. I wanted to be part of a band. That is when I formed my first band, at the age of twelve. That is what really lit my spark, playing with other kids. I just loved that. That motivation to have a group has stayed with me all these years. So, I am still doing what I aspired to do when I was twelve.

S.M: You not only play music with other fine musicians from a variety of traditions, but your collaborators in sound have come to include non-human species as well, such as wolves and whales. How did this start?
P.W: In May of 1968 I went to a lecture by Roger Payne at Rockefeller University, who had recorded humpbacked whales. It blew me away. The beauty of their voices—the soulfulness of their voices struck me in a similar way that the saxophone playing of Charlie Parker had moved me. 3 There was something about the soul of life, the soul of the earth, the soul of the world in it. It is hard to say what it was, but it touched me in a purely musical way. Here, in a way, was another horn. Then to learn that the whales sing these long, complicated patterns that sometimes last thirty minutes and that there is as much variety in them as in a Beethoven symphony. Then, they repeat the same thirty-minute complex sequence verbatim, again and again and again. And all the whales are singing this same complex song. Then, a year goes by and the whales are all back singing yet another song. This revelation was staggering.
Here is a creature that has been for so long regarded as just a big fish, a big mound of blubber, using an intelligence that is every bit as extraordinary as our human intelligence. That was the biggest door opening in my life. It opened the door not only to what I call the “Greater Symphony of the Earth” but to the greater family of life.
I began to realize that we are just one of fifteen or twenty million species. It did not take very long to realize that we are the youngest of all of those twenty million species—the very youngest. We are the newcomers. The whales and the wolves have been around for, say, thirty million years. We have been here with our big brain that characterizes us as homo sapiens for maybe three hundred thousand. That is just one one-hundredth as long as those other creatures. I realized that not only do these creatures have intelligences that are admirable in terms of our own values, in terms of the way they interact with each other, in terms of the beauty of the way they are, but also that they as species long, long ago learned how to live in harmony with their environment—or else they would not be here. And we haven’t even begun to learn that.
These twenty million species that are here now are probably some tiny fraction of the thousands of millions of experiments that nature brought forth. And the other 99.999% are gone because they did not find out how to be in balance with the rest of nature.
And, where are we going to be in the next few years?

S.M: Perhaps another one of nature’s failed experiments—melancholy thought. But how do you think that the music you play in any way will help our species come into balance with our environment before it is too late?
P.W: In my experience, the motivation for making music has been to make it for its own sake—the love of music in its beauty and variety of voices, and also as a means of celebrating voices, creatures, and people whom I have come to know and love. It is an expression of love, an attempt to translate that feeling you have while being in the Grand Canyon, that exalted feeling I have when visiting the Miho Museum 4 or when first seeing Misono. 5 And you wonder, how would that sound in music if you could translate it. It is like bringing home a photograph of a place that you have been to show your family. You hope to convey something, to say I was here and had this experience, that I went down the Colorado River and would like to share something with you that I am excited about.
You cannot go into it thinking you have a chance to turn the world around. I cannot plan a strategy like that. It is not like a political campaign. You do it first because you dream of hearing this certain combination of sounds. In a sense, you do it first for yourself. Then, anything that happens beyond that is serendipitous, a bonus.
From another point of view, I feel optimistic that music has a potential for making a tremendous contribution to our wayward species. And I think that the aural faculty is possibly one doorway to our salvation, although it might be one of our less used faculties. Most of us in the developed world are mainly visual. The aural is just a sound-tract that accompanies what we are watching. But the aural, left to its own devices, when hearing with one’s eyes closed, is an amazing gateway to a whole realm of experience that might give an integrated experience of life. To me, it is close to what Zen people call the “beginner’s mind,” because the aural faculty presents a whole body of being.
To my untutored notion, aural perception does not get filtered through what I call the “supreme cortex,” which is always judging, grinding things out, and constantly wanting something new. Even the most beautiful Sierra Club photograph is looked at once and then put on the shelf. You do not look at it again, because you already saw it. You want something (Snapping his fingers) new all the time. But if there is a piece of music that has moved you, you can listen to it hundreds of times and still be moved.
It is because of the medium itself that I feel I have a better chance of making a contribution.

S.M: You mentioned places, such as the Colorado River and the Miho Museum, whose character you would like to express in music. You have played in some notable acoustical spaces, such as the Grand Canyon and St. John the Divine in New York City. Does the acoustical space influence your choice of sounds or do you look for spaces that fit the music you intend to make?

P.W: It is like singing in the shower. You look for a space in which your own voice will be enhanced. Certainly, when I went to the Grand Canyon I took instruments along. After my first trips there, I realized what instruments I needed to project in that space. We took a cello on the first and second trip. But on the fourth trip, I found the side canyon where I had the great acoustics I wanted, where I recorded about half the “Canyon” album. I brought only horns that would project, a French horn and a sax. I did not bring the cello because a cello by nature is not an outdoor instrument, although it sounded wonderful in some of the situations we played in down there. But in that vast side canyon, with its eight hundred foot, curving wall that formed a cul-de-sac, with its seven-second reverberation, I imagined instruments that had a much longer, more intense projection.

S.M: What are your thoughts on spirituality and your music?

P.W: Certainly, the root of the word “spirit” means breath and therefore life. 6 So, the words “spirit,” “music,” and “life” are synonymous in a way. I have come to aspire to what I call “music-life.” That is not only sound-play when you call it music, but also sounds resonating as part of daily life, much in the way birds make sound-music in the morning and evening—all birds, not just the ones that took lessons and were told they have talent. One of my favorite quotes is “The woods would be very silent if the only birds that sang were those that sing the best.”
Again, looking at my daughter these last few years, her spontaneity, her expression and the joy in her movements, to me she is an absolutely musical being. Not always harmonious, she can be a rascal, but even in that she is being authentically herself. She is being much more honest in her whole range of expression than I was at her age. I was being a little bit more contained.
Also, I think a lot about the musical relations among people, people filled with kindness and enthusiasm. I like the root of the word “enthusiasm” as well. It comes from entheos, which means the god within. It is like the kindness and humility that I find in Japan. To be in Japan among the Japanese is a very musical experience. There is a great deal of musicality in their voices and language. There is also this tremendous sense of serving and giving. I would say that expression is the true reward of living—giving out, not taking in.
Giving out is much more gratifying than taking in, consuming. To me what is most evident in the developed world is off-track; it is taking, it is power. We have leaders and cultural icons who are pathologically addicted to power. And it is as severe an addiction as cocaine or alcohol. It is a disease. Yet we do not see it because they all wear suits, ties, and smiles.
Art should express our true nature. Not necessarily the special abilities of superior people. There is too much praise of famous people in our culture. We have stars. I feel that there is innate expression in every human being and therefore there is art in every human being. I do not set art or the artist apart from other people. And I do not believe in the idea of talent.

S.M: What is your take on the notion of talent?

P.W: If everyone has an innate ability for self expression, a unique voice—using that as a metaphor for a life path or a propensity toward some activity—maybe it is different from anything experienced by anyone else. There are millions of mothers who are saints and great artists in their devotion to their children. And that might be their path. The goal to which we ought to encourage, not only our children but also all people—people who perhaps are in the later stages of their journey and perhaps never allowed themselves to think that they had the license to do what they most love—is to find their own voice.
Joseph Campbell calls this “finding your bliss.” 7 That is a thrilling prospect. I never knew that you could get to do that in life, that it was okay, until I discovered writers like him in my thirties and forties. I want every kid to be told that.
I do not want them growing up aspiring to be the next Bruce Springsteen or the next Frank Sinatra or the next Jascha Heifetz. What I tell people in my music workshops is not to aspire to be like those people because their life path is already covered and nobody can do what you do as well as you. You have no competition. Also, I think that the world needs your song. It does not want you to be somebody else. That has already been covered.
In Bali many people participate in artistic expression. And I would think that is the direction in which everyone ought to be going, rather than being among the thousands of media sheep flocking to halls to worship at the alter of famous stars, the ones who have all the “talent.” The stars were people who maybe were luckier than others. They got a jump on what they loved. They found their bliss early. And, of course, many of them had a tremendous business inclination too. And in our culture there are not too many people out there in the limelight that do not also have a tremendous entrepreneurial compulsion to sell, as well as to find handlers that will further propel them.
What I am interested in is the expression of the humble and the shy. I want to encourage them. Maybe we do not all have the same inclinations to do the same things. We are not all going to be clarinet players or piano players or dancers. But there is a huge array of possibilities in life. And somewhere in that vast diversity of opportunities for adventure and expression, I would like to think that there is something for everyone.

S.M: One last question. You mentioned your young daughter throughout this interview, yet you never have given her name or her age.

P.W: She is eight and her name is Keetu.

S.M: Keetu.

P.W: It is a Mohegan Indian name. The whole name is Keetuhomanet. It means, “one who sings of life.”

(Footnotes)

1 Apollonian and Dionysian, two approaches to life and art, taking their names from the Hellenic gods Apollo and Dionysus, roughly related to Meishusama’s concept of Shojo and Daijo.

2 Stan Kenton (1911-1979), innovative bandleader who revolutionized jazz, especially the big band sound during the 1940s through the 1970s, by introducing progressive arrangements, harmonies, and rhythms, and integrating jazz with other genres.

3 Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920-1955), legendary alto-saxophonist from Kansas City. One of the most talented and influential jazz musicians of his era.

4 Miho Museum, the museum designed by I. M. Pei in the Shigaraki Mountains of Japan to house the Shumei Art Collection.

5 Misono, Shumei’s International Headquarters and Spiritual Center in the Shigaraki Mountains of Shiga Prefecture, Japan. The name “Misono” means “Sacred Garden.”

6 The English word “spirit,” from which the word “spiritual” derives, comes from the Latin “spi¯ritus,” which means “breath.” As the sound of the human voice comes from breath, and the voice is humankind’s first musical instrument, it can be said that music comes from the spirit.

7 Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), highly influential American anthropologist, mythologist and writer.

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