Some thoughts on “Earth Music”
by Paul Winter

Throughout the several decades of the Consort’s journey, the most perennial question we’ve been asked has been: “What do you call your music?” “Earth Music” is the response I’ve most often given, as that term embraces the totality of our field of play, and our long-going aspirations to celebrate the cultures and creatures of the whole Earth.

I feel it’s time to put forth the answer with music, in the form of an album. Included are pieces celebrating the Grand Canyon, the old-growth forest of our Northwest, the ocean, the moon, and our star, the sun, with its quadzillions of dancing particles. Consorting with us are representative voices from what we think of as “the greater symphony of the Earth”: Spotted Owl, Timber Wolf, African Fish Eagle, and Humpback Whale. And no album or concert to me is complete without an offering from the great mentor of our Consort heritage, Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music awakens in me a resonance with the soul of the Earth.

We have been blessed to have had many opportunities and adventures over the years, and to have been able to pursue our mission of creating music of beauty in the service of the community of all life.

Thank you for listening,

For living music,

Credits

Paul Winter / soprano sax
Paul McCandless / English horn, oboe
Eugene Friesen / cello
Rhonda Larson / flute
John Clark / French horn
Mark Perchanok / Heckelphone
Paul Halley / piano, pipe organ
Paul Sullivan / piano, keyboard
Jeff Holmes / piano
Tim Brumfield / pipe organ
Eliot Wadopian / bass
Russ Landau / bass
Glen Velez / percussion
Ted Moore / percussion
Jamey Haddad / drums
Paul Wertico / drums
Gordon Gottlieb / timpani
Kenny Mazur / steel-string guitar

Track List

Cathedral Forest
Wolf Eyes
Sax-Wolf Duet
Sea Song
Sun Singer
Dancing Particles
Eagle
My Father’s Smile
Canyon Chaconne
Belly of the Whale
The Rising Moon
Sunderland
Adagio
And the Earth Spins

A Holiday Celebration on a Spectacular Scale

Music, dance and renewal of spirit at the great turning point of the year.

For three decades, Paul Winter’s Solstice Celebration has joined The Nutcracker and Radio City Christmas as one of New York’s favorite holiday traditions.

The six-time Grammy® winning Paul Winter Consort will be joined by special guests: Armenian vocalist Arto Tunçboyaciyan, Gospel singer Theresa Thomason and the dancers and drummers of Forces of Nature Dance Theatre. The program will include music from the Consort’s new album Miho: Journey to the Mountain.

Since ancient times, people have felt a calling to come together during the cold and dark December nights around Winter Solstice. In the tradition of these gatherings, the Winter Solstice Celebration is a chance welcome the return of the sun and the birth of the new year.

When:        Thursday, Dec. 16 – 8 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 17 – 8 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 18 – 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.

Where:      Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave., Manhattan
At 112th St., near Columbia University

Tickets:      General Admission, $35 & $50 / Reserved, $80
Available at SolsticeConcert.com
or call OvationTix: 866-811-4111

Visit SolsticeConcert.com
- free download album (9 tracks)
- videos from past solstice concerts
- tickets and travel details

A New York Tradition

The winter solstice brings the year’s final feast, as the harvest is in and the long winter looms. Ritual bridges the treacherous gap between darkness and renewed light, from Japan to Mali to Northern Scandinavia.

From this rich cloth, six-time Grammy winning musician Paul Winter and the Paul Winter Consort have fashioned a constantly shifting pageant to mark the occasion, flooding the shadowed heights of a cathedral with light and vibrant movement, with fresh ritual and celebration. Over the past three decades, it’s become a New York tradition, an innovative, creative answer to the holiday tinsel, invoking our bond with the sun and the cosmos.

The 31st annual Winter Solstice Celebration (December 16-18, 2010) at the magnificently resonant Cathedral of St. John the Divine continues the age-old lineage of solstice festivities. The edgy energy of category-defying Armenian singer and percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan and the stirring rhythms of the Forces of Nature Dance Theatre feed the Consort’s vision of an all-embracing human moment. This year’s solstice celebration will see the debut of a collaborative piece composed with the special guests, as well as the live premiere of selections from the Consort’s latest album, Miho: Journey to the Mountain.

The solstice has long been a moment for reflection and merriment, surrounded by powerful rituals of sound and light. “The winter solstice occurs on the longest night of the year. It is the moment when the sun seems to stands still on its apparent path across the sky before reversing its course,” Winter explains. “This key moment in the relationship of the Earth to our Sun gives us a rare opportunity to embrace the darkness and the fact that we all share a home in the Universe.”

To encourage this contact, the Consort’s celebration creates an intense, rippling tapestry of the world’s music. This culminates in “The Journey Through the Longest Night,” a 25-minute musical suite, with an elegantly choreographed transition from darkness to light, and musicians moving through the cathedral’s shadowy nave. The turning Solstice Tree of Sounds, a 28-foot aluminum installation glittering with hundreds of gongs and chimes, draws both eye and ear. At the climax, a giant sun gong with its player rises twelve stories into the heights of the world’s largest Gothic cathedral. 

These moments transform the performance into a live surround-sound and vision immersive experience. They hint that the celebration has greater depth and breadth—and a bolder energy—than many realize.

It all started with a quirky carte blanche from the Cathedral’s ecologically minded dean, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, who told Winter, when he invited him and the Consort to be artists-in-residence, “That means you can do anything you want, baby.”

What Winter and the Consort wanted to do was find the most universal milestone of the year. The solstice was a groundbreaking choice: It had long vibrated with expectancy and fire, and could counteract the hype and commerce that characterize the December holidays. They wanted ritual, but without the bounds of organized faith.

They created an annual event that made full use of the Cathedral, its unique and mysterious feel, seven-second reverberation, and even its world-class pipe organ. Crafting a performance defined by a singular space remains an innovative one. Winter and the Consort, old hands at playing everything from the Grand Canyon to the striking I.M. Pei-designed Miho Museum in Japan, transform the great empty nave into a full-bodied sensory delight, invoking voices from the four corners of the globe.

One of these voices belongs to Anatolian-born Armenian cutting-edge musician, Arto Tuncboyaciyan, who can move effortlessly from Black Sea traditions to jamming with the rock band System of a Down. With a shifting palette of invented words, Tuncboyaciyan invokes the bittersweet longing and unflagging strength he has gained grappling with his family’s and people’s tragic past.

Winter first heard Tuncboyaciyan, a masterful percussionist, sing at a rehearsal, when a voice drifted quietly through the room during a break. “I sat and listened and was fascinated,” remembers Winter. “When he finished, I asked what he was singing and he replied, ‘Oh, it’s just something I came up with.’ I insisted he sing at our next concert and it was unforgettable.”

Joining the Consort and Tuncboyaciyan will be the dynamic Forces of Nature Dance Theater, in an original collaborative piece. The Theatre’s deep embrace of West African and African diaspora forms and rhythms creates an intriguing dialogue with the more northerly sensibilities Winter engages. The result promises to be exciting, visceral, and festive.
“My aspiration is that the audience will come away with their spirits awakened, and with a deepened sense of relatedness to the world and perhaps even the cosmos,” Winter explains. “I’d like to invite people to come with a sense of adventure—to have some new musical experience and also to go deeper into themselves. I want take people on a journey, and bring them home.”

The Winter Solstice will be celebrated Dec. 16 & 17 at 8:00pm and Dec. 18 at 2pm and 7:30pm, at St. John the Divine. (1047 Amsterdam Ave at 111th St.; near Columbia Univ.) For more info and tickets, see www.solsticeconcert.com.

“Extraordinary music. … The Paul Winter Consort has created a classic.”
- Stephen Hill, Hearts of Space

“Paul Winter’s music pulsates with the earth’s polyrhythmic heartbeat. Various incarnations of his Consort have been so in tune with the ground beneath their feet that this ensemble, in all its forms, has come to be the harbinger of the wellspring of all life. … However, with the release of Miho: Journey to the Mountain, Winter may have exceeded himself in his unique musical expression.”
- Raul d’Gama Rose, All About Jazz

Grammy Award Winner for the best new age album of 2010.

Recorded in the Miho Museum, one of Japan’s iconic buildings, designed by I.M. Pei and hidden mostly under the Shigaraki Mountains near Kyoto. Intertwining with taiko drums, bansuri flute, sarangi fiddle and Paul Winter’s clear sax are the birdcalls, waterfalls, and bells of the Miho. All serve to form a shifting, meditative image of paradise found and reflected in the glass and steel of a great architect, in the warp and clay of ancient artisans.

Inspired by the legend of Shangri-La, world-renowned American architect I.M. Pei came out of retirement to design the Miho Museum, reached by a soundproofed tunnel meant to clear the mind and then by a graceful suspension bridge over a stunning gorge. It echoes the journey from a famous tale of a fisherman, following a river farther into the mountains than he ever had before, only to come through a tunnel-like cavern into the ravishing valley of Shangri-La, filled with blooming peach trees.

The Consort includes Paul Winter, soprano sax; Arto Tuncboyaciyan , vocals and sazabo; Paul McCandless, woodwinds; Steve Gorn, bansuri; Eugene Friesen, cello; Glen Velez, percussion; Don Grusin, keyboard; Dhruba Ghosh, sarangi; Yukiko Matsuyama, koto; the Shumei Taiko Ensemble; Yangjin Lamu, voice; Tim Brumfield, organ; Café, percussion; Jordan Rudess, keyboard; Eriko Koide, carillon; The Shumei Chorus, conducted by Hiroko Matsui.

The Garden of Sonic Delights

Paul Winter Consort Finds a Resonant Paradise in a Japanese Architectural Treasure

Paradise began as an enclosed garden but morphed into Shangri-la, a valley concealed and shimmering with peach blossoms. Now it echoes in a peaceable kingdom inside a mountain top, filled with resonant chambers and great treasures: the I. M. Pei-designed Miho Museum in the Shigaraki Mountains of Japan. This unique setting has inspired the  Paul Winter Consort’s latest exploration of sound, spirit and space, Miho: Journey to the Mountain. There the Consort conjured the resonant frequencies of paradise with a tapestry of the Earth’s voices:  sarangi and sax, taiko drums and rumbling elephants, Heckelphone and Japanese bush warbler.

Miho album to the cover

Winter first rose to musical prominence in the early 1960s with an award-winning jazz sextet. A sojourn in Brazil, however, taught him that their brash bebop could be complemented by the gentle and soulful esthetic he found in the music there. Soon afterward in 1968, Winter founded the Consort, as a forum for all the voices, music, and sounds he had come to love. The Consort embraced natural sounds as music, and explored many of the planet’s musical cultures before the dawn of “world music.”

To describe his often unclassifiable, genre-crossing work in a more accurate and satisfying way, Winter refers to it as “Earth Music.” The name reflects the source of the Consort’s inspiration and their “aspiration to celebrate the cultures and creatures of the whole Earth,” Winter explains.

As a part of Earth Music, Winter and his ensemble have honed their appreciation of resonance, and for making music in spaces of great reverberation. They have discovered these sonic temples by rafting into the Grand Canyon, playing in the world’s largest cathedral as artists-in-residence at St. John the Divine in New York, or methodically searching for the sweet spots around an alpine lake at 12,000 feet in the mountains of Colorado. The results garnered half a dozen Grammys™. Miho: Journey to the Mountain is another adventure in the lineage of Winter’s landmark albums: Icarus (1972), Common Ground (1978); Canyon (1986); Concert for the Earth (Live at the UN) (1984); EarthBeat (1988); Celtic Solstice (1997); Journey with the Sun (2001); Crestone (2007).

Acoustics, however, were just one part of the Miho Museum’s appeal. Inspired by the legend of Shangri-la, world renowned American architect I.M. Pei came out of retirement to design the mountain museum, reached by a soundproofed tunnel (meant to quiet the mind) that leads on to a graceful suspension bridge over a stunning gorge. It echoes the journey in an ancient legend of a Chinese fisherman, who follows a river farther into the mountains than he ever had before, only to come through a tunnel-like cavern into the ravishing valley of Shangri-la, filled with blooming peach trees.

The building itself—85% of which had to be built below ground due to the site’s status as a natural preserve—draws on the traditional form of the Japanese farmhouse, yet employs Pei’s signature glass roof and love of modern materials. To abide by the preserve’s regulations, Pei retained the original contour of the mountain that the Museum builders effectively moved and replaced to create the space.

Pei’s approach to designing the Museum had a musical side. The architect employs one simple shape, the triangle, repeated to yield complexity, inspired by the way J.S. Bach takes a simple theme and transforms it via complex variations. Winter honored this by featuring a three-note theme at various times throughout the album, including in a solo by the carillon in Pei’s great 193-foot bell tower, the only one of its kind in Japan.

Winter was asked by Shumei, a Japanese organization dedicated to beauty in the arts, natural agriculture, and spiritual healing, to create a musical celebration of the Museum. The celebration marked the 100th birthday of Mihoko Koyama, the woman who was their leader and whose name graces the Museum. He first explored the Museum’s spaces, improvising on his sax, communing with the antiquities and the unique acoustics. “By this time, I was completely smitten with the building, the landscape, the whole place,” remembers Winter. “It’s an extraordinary marriage of architecture and nature. I gradually came to appreciate the antiquities and resonate with the story they seem to tell.”

The artifacts from across Asia suggested both the instruments and voices Winter longed to hear, as well as the images and feelings that the pieces evoke. He began working with long-time collaborators like bansuri (Indian bamboo flute) player Steve Gorn, Armenian instrumentalist and soulful vocalist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, multifaceted percussionist Glen Velez, and double-reed master Paul McCandless. Winter also invited new musical acquaintances, like ethereal Tibetan singer Yangjin Lamu and a renowned player of the sarangi, Dhruba Ghosh, whose classical Indian bowed instrument has dozens of strings that are notoriously difficult to tune and play.

The Consort’s work subtly reflects the cultural breadth of the Museum and its emphasis on the journey of culture from Asia’s heart to its Pacific edge in Japan. A primary aspect of this Eastward cultural migration was the notion of paradise (the word “paradise” itself stems from an Old Persian root meaning ”walled garden”). Wherever paradise took root as an idea, it bore beautiful fruit: carpets, paintings, vases, even simple tea bowls.

“From spending time among the antiquities, I gradually got the idea that paradise was a central theme,” reflects Winter. “People for millennia have wondered about eternity, the afterlife, and have dealt with the reality of death and the hope that there might be something beyond. The stories or visions of wonderful heaven occur across human tradition.”

The first part of the journey, “Many Paths to Paradise,” gives solo or near-solo voice to the varied players and musicians, often connecting them with the Museum’s treasures. Thus, Velez’s resounding frame drum takes up the pulse from the Miho’s giant Sanguszko Carpet, depicting frolicking musicians in rich Persian colors.

The second half of the album, “Shangri-la,” tells interwoven tales of the legendary hidden valley and the Museum itself. In shaping these tales, Winter was particularly taken by the wistful portrayal of two great beasts on a screen by the 18th-century Japanese master Jakuchu, who shows an elephant trumpeting at a half-submerged spouting whale. The screen became the Jakuchu Suite and sparked performances both playful and contemplative, while fostering the kind of joyful transcultural (and trans-species) dialogue Winter delights in.

“Elephant Dance” emerged as Velez taught polyrhythms to the local taiko drumming ensemble, and the deep boom of the lowest and largest taiko drum meshes beautifully with the rumbling voices of Asian elephants. “Whale Raga” flowed from the discovery that Ghosh’s sarangi was in the same key as a recording Winter had of whale songs. Ghosh so enjoyed his duet with the whales, he asked to use their recordings as part of future concerts in India.

Interweaving with the Consort’s discoveries and Winter’s clear sax are the birdcalls, waterfall, and bells of the Miho’s realm. All serve to form a meditative and dynamic image of paradise found and reflected in the glass and steel of a great architect, in the warp and clay of ancient artisans. “These are the happy results that emerge when you have a creative crucible: inspired players in a heavenly realm,” Winter smiles.

View the Miho album booklet.

May 12, 8:00pm – Westport, CT
WPKN Benefit, duet with Paul Sullivan
Unitarian Church
10 Lyons Plains Road Westport, CT 06880
[ Click here for more information and tickets ]

June 16 – New York, NY
Summer Solstice Celebration
Cathedral of St John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave., NY, NY 10025

August 25, 7:30pm – Ellsworth, ME
Downeast Spiritual Life Conference
The Grand Auditorium
165 Main St. Ellsworth, Maine 04605
[ Click here for more information ]

June 18, 2011, 4:30 a.m. (Sat.) – New York City
Paul Winter’s 16TH Annual Summer Solstice Celebration
Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Winner of a Grammy® Award as Best New Age Album of 2008, Living Music’s latest release, the Paul Winter Consort’s new album: CRESTONE: A Celebration of the World of Crestone , celebrates the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Great Sand Dunes, and San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado.

Photo by Bill Ellzey

The primary recordings for this new release were done in the natural acoustics of North Crestone Lake, at an altitude of 11,800 feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The album introduces to the world the voice pow-wow drum and cedar flute of John-Carlos Perea, a young singer of Apache heritage, who sings in the Northern Plains Indian tradition. The album also features

the voices of Mountain Bluebird, Red-winged Blackbird, Whooping Crane, Meadowlark, Sandhill Cranes, Coyotes, and Buffalo.

The Consort includes Paul Winter, soprano sax; Paul McCandless, oboe and bass clarinet; Eugene Friesen, cello; Glen Velez, percussion; Don Grusin, keyboard; Koji Nakamura, Japanese taiko drum; Peter May, conch shells; and Richard Cooke, voice.

From the liner notes:

“All my relations!” The Ute Medicine Man called out this prayer each time he poured water over the red-hot rocks in the fire pit at the center of the sweat-lodge. When we finally emerged from the lodge into the cool night air, I was stunned by the vast umbrella of bright stars above us. Later that evening, I played some calls toward the mountain on my horn, and a pack of coyotes began to howl.

Crestone album cover

This was my first visit to Crestone, a tiny town at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. It lies in the northeast corner of the San Luis Valley, the largest alpine valley in the world, larger, in fact, than my entire home-state of Connecticut. For 12,000 years the Valley has been used by people as a hunting ground and migration corridor. Many Indian tribes have regarded this land as very sacred, and in recent times, contemporary seekers have been drawn here.

It was September, 1979, and I was there to take part in the annual conference of the Lindisfarne Fellowship, an association of creative individuals in the arts, sciences, and contemplative practices, devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture. Lindisfarne’s founder, poet and cultural philosopher William Irwin Thompson, had come to Crestone to establish a solar village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Among the Lindisfarne Fellows at that first conference in Crestone were poet/farmer Wendell Berry; anthropologist Joan Halifax; astronaut Rusty Schweickart; physicist Amory Lovins; ecologists Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd; Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand; poet GarySnyder; biologist Lynn Margulis; Arcosanti builder Paolo Soleri; neuro-scientist Francisco Varela; Esalen founder Michael Murphy; economist Hazel Henderson; environmental educator David Orr; ecologist Dana Jackson; botanist Wes Jackson; architect Sim Van der Ryn; and the Dean of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton. Spending time with these extraordinary people, in the exhilarating atmosphere of Crestone, was deeply inspiring. I don’t recall much of what we discussed during those days together, but I do remember vividly our great volleyball games, a sunset picnic at the Great Sand Dunes, and the sweat-lodge.

Returning to Crestone often over the next fifteen years for these yearly Lindisfarne gatherings, I developed a deep sense of kinship both with this magnificent landscape and with the multi-cultural perspective of the people I met there.

In 2004 I was invited back to Crestone to play a concert for the Shumei International Institute, which had recently been established there. I had met the musicians of the Shumei Taiko Ensemble at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and the Consort and I later played with them in an “Earth Celebration” in Pennsylvania for the Rodale Institute, with whom Shumei has had a long-term collaboration in natural agriculture. Looking out once again at the breathtaking panorama of this valley and these mountains, and reflecting on my twenty-five year relationship with Crestone, I felt a calling to make music about this remarkable realm.

As in the recording of my albums about the Grand Canyon and the Northern Rockies, my first quest was to find a resonant acoustic space in the mountains where the land would respond to our music with reverberations and echoes. I was fortunate to find in Crestone an extraordinary guide, Peter May, a natural architect who knows the mountains intimately, and who also happens to play trumpet, as well as being chief of one of Crestone’s fire departments (“Kundalini Fire Management”). Peter and I hiked to several places and played our horns to test the acoustics, but found no magical-sounding spaces. I soon realized that finding my “acoustic Shangri-la” here in the Sangres was going to be more difficult than it had been in canyon country, where there are vertical walls to reflect the sound. Peter volunteered to continue making reconnaissance trips, and over the next year he hiked to fifteen sites, recording his trumpet on a video camera and sending me the cassettes so I could hear the acoustics. One of these places, North Crestone Lake, at 11,800 feet, seemed to have promise. In the fall of 2005, I returned to Crestone and we hiked up there with Steve Van Zandt, our field recording engineer, who had been on several of our Grand Canyon expeditions. I played my saxat various points around the lake. The sound was thrilling, and the setting spectacular. This was the place.

Photo by Bill Ellzey

Over the next year, we made plans for the recording expedition, and in early September, 2006, our entourage of musicians, cooks, hostlers, photographers, and crew gathered in Crestone. With fifteen people, several horses and mules, camping gear, food, an inflatable raft, and an array of instruments, including a large Japanese taiko drum, we made the long pilgrimage up to North Crestone Lake. Weset up a tent village, well back from the lake, with a full viewof 13,931-foot Mt. Adams rising up beyond the opposite shore. During the following week we made music in many places on and around the lake, and at all times of day and night. The whole experience, as in my past wilderness recording adventures, was profoundly nourishing: the sounds, the creatures, the
camaraderie, the humor, the crisp September air, the water, the cold nights, the moon, and the warm morning sun.

This alpine cirque became our sanctuary, our wisdom spot, and our place of baptism into this immense landscape. Here we could learn again to listen, and from here we could call out to the world.

Other adventures followed the expedition, in various places around the San Luis Valley, including the Great Sand Dunes, the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge, and the vast Medano-Zapata Ranch. I imagined sound-paintings of these scenes, with a mandala of voices reflecting the diversity of this life-community. A journey-story began to weave itself together, in which a succession of musical spirit-guides would carry us through the morning, afternoon, and evening of a day in the world of Crestone.

My sense is that this album asks for a special mode of listening. The journey works best for me when I’m lying flat on my back, with my eyes closed, and I participate more in my imagination, the way we listened in the old days of radio. I’ll be grateful to all who listen, and share these adventures, as I am to all who took part in the realization of this music.

Gratitude to all my relations,
Paul Winter

PLAYERS

KOJI NAKAMURA / taiko drum
Koji was born in the countryside of Hyogo prefecture in Northern Japan. He is a master drummer in the Japanese taiko tradition, and was formerly a member of the Japanese group Ondekoza and leader of the Shumei Taiko Ensemble, with whom he has performed around the world.

JOHN-CARLOS PEREA / voice, drum, cedar flute
John-Carlos’ heritage is Mescalero Apache and Irish American. He was born in Dulce, NewMexico, on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation not far from the San Luis Valley. He learned the Northern-style Indian singing tradition while studying with Barney Hoehner-Peji (Lakota) and singing with the Blue Horse Singers, a pow-wow drum group. He received degrees in music from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology.
www.johncarlosperea.com

PAUL McCANDLESS / oboe, bass clarinet
Born in Pennsylvania, Paul studied music at the Manhattan School of Music, and from 1968 to 1972 was the original double-reed player in the Paul Winter Consort. He is a founding member of the acclaimed quartet, Oregon, with whom he has played for the past 35 years.
www.paulmccandless.com

EUGENE FRIESEN / cello
Eugene was born in Kansas, the son of Mennonite parents who emigrated from Siberia. A graduate of the Yale School of Music, he has been the cellist with the Paul Winter Consort since 1978. He is featured on over 25 Living Music recordings. In 2004 he recorded an album in the Miho Museum in Japan, entitled Sono Miho.
www.celloman.com

GLEN VELEZ / percussion
A native of Texas, Glen studied the traditions of Western percussion as well as those of many cultures around the world. He has played with the Paul Winter Consort since 1983, and has performed and recorded with a great diversity of world, symphonic and jazz musicians.
www.glenvelez.com

PETER MAY / conch shells
Peter May lives in Crestone, where he practices architecture, leads wilderness education programs, and is chief of one of the fire departments. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he has a degree in architecture from the University of Michigan.
www.wildinspiredmusic.com

DON GRUSIN / keyboard
Born and raised in Colorado, Don has long regarded the Sangre de Cristo Range as his favorite mountains. He has performed and recorded widely, producing nine series of albums under his own name.
www.dongrusin.com

RICHARD COOKE / voice
Richard comes from Kentucky, where he sang in church choirs during his boyhood. As road manager for the Consort in the mid-’80s, he began building unique types of xylophones, from which grew his enterprise “Freenotes,” producing a variety of innovative instruments that anyone can play easily.
www.freenotes.net

Since 1980, the Grammy® Award-winning Paul Winter Consort has celebrated the Winter Solstice, the seasonal rite of passage, with a musical feast from the cornucopia of cultures and creatures of the world, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. To commemorate their 25th Annual Winter Solstice Celebration, Living Music has released a new box-set entitled Silver Solstice, featuring the Consort with a host of special guests. The album includes the entire performance of the 25th celebration, plus 10 tracks from previous years’ solstice events. The box-set presents the 142 minutes of music on 2 stereo CDs, and also in Surround Sound on one bonus DVD-Audio disc.

For three decades, Paul Winter has put forth his musical vision of the community of the Earth, beginning with his landmark album COMMON GROUND in the 1970s. Silver Solstice embraces the musical traditions of many cultures, and includes voices from what Winter calls “the greater symphony of the Earth” – whale, wolf and uirapuru (the musical wren of the Amazon rainforest) – a trilogy of voices representing the sea, the land, and the air.

The special guests on Silver Solstice include gospel singer Theresa Thomason, Brazilian diva Luciana Souza, sean nos (old style) Celtic singer Noirin Ni Riain, Armenian singer and percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, Irish Uillean piper Davy Spillane, Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart, mbira master Chris Berry, and the nine-voice Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble from Russia.

Nominated for the 2000 Grammy® for World Music.

Adventures of a caravan of world musicians, recorded in the great space of the world’s largest Gothic cathedral- this is Living Music’s recent release, JOURNEY WITH THE SUN

Grammy-Winner Paul Winter presents his new Earth Band, featuring the great Irish piper, Davy Spillane (of ‘Riverdance’), legendary Armenian vocalist and percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, cellist Eugene Friesen and keyboardist Paul Halley (long-time members of the Paul Winter Consort) along with special guest Mickey Hart (of the Grateful Dead) playing his new instrument, RAMU (Random Access Music Universe), and a caravan of 9 other world musicians, on a journey of new musical adventures born of Winter’s renowned annual Solstice Celebrations.

MUSICIANS

Paul Winter
Arto Tuncboyaciyan
Davy Spillane
Eugene Friesen
Paul Halley
Mickey Hart
Niamh Parsons
Vardan Grigoryan
Damian Draghici
Jerry O’Sullivan
Zan McLeod
Jordan Rudess
Jim Beard
Dorothy Papadakos
Eliot Wadopian