An affirmative and celebratory workshop that is equally nourishing for beginners, amateurs and professionals – led by Paul Winter.

For anyone who has an interest in self-expression. NO MUSICAL EXPERIENCE IS REQUIRED.

Paul Winter’s premise is that ALL people have a well-spring of music within them, and that this can be easily unlocked through shared experiences in sound play.

The sound play is done collectively, in small groups, and provides an experience full of discovery, joy, humor, and fun. There is no emphasis on soloing, virtuosity, or performing. It is not a “master class” on how to play expertly in a particular tradition; rather the program creates contexts in which the instinct for spontaneous expression can be awakened and nurtured. The same ability by which we converse with words through improvising are brought into play in a myriad of different combinations of instruments and voices, in an environment of profound quiet and deep listening.

These adventures are intended to offer liberating experiences for the shyest person, who may have been told in the 4th grade that they “couldn’t carry a tune in a paper bag,” and for the classically-trained musician who has yearned to play freely without direction from a printed page.

This workshop embraces the instruments and voices of all musical traditions: folk, jazz, symphonic, ethnic, home-made, and animal. Each participant is asked to bring an instrument, regardless of whether they can play it. Anything from a kazoo to a contrabassoon is welcome. And there will be a galaxy of percussion instruments that anyone can play.

Subject:  Some Post-Adventure Reflections, to Fellow Sound-Play Rowers, from Paul Winter

Dear Fellow Rowers,

I had a raft of reflections after our shared experience last month, particularly catalyzed by our final session Sunday morning, and I wrote them down over the next several days, but only now have found time to pull them together and send to you. I am, once again, grateful to this fertile garden of sound-play, our shared playground, for the on-going life-lessons that keep coming forth. And I am grateful to all of you, for collectively creating this garden; and to Rowe, for hosting it.

Lost Grace or the Opportunities that Challenges Present

[Note: These are the notions and musings of a fellow student, not the pronouncements of a teacher.]

That Saturday afternoon, because of the dampness and chill in the Chapel, someone suggested we ask about moving the sessions to another space.. The Rowe staff very kindly agreed to let us use the new dining room “temple” (which I’ve always thought should be a space for music), and after supper a well-meaning staff member very kindly arranged a circle of 30 chairs in there for us (of course having no idea of my “phobia,” or issue, re. chairs).

The chairs didn’t seem to be an impediment that night, as we had darkness available for our “adventures,” and then when our guests from the film workshop came in later the chairs accommodated some of them.

However, Sunday morning was to be another story. There was some shock amongst us, as people came in after breakfast and saw name-cards on various chairs, as part of Eve’s new composition which I (unbeknownst to the group) had suggested we begin the morning with. Something about this new set-up, with chairs around the room, and these instructions, seemed to feel alien to this “liberated” field of play we had created since Friday evening; and at the same time perhaps felt all too familiar to our many years in classrooms, the collective effect of which we had all come to Rowe to overcome.  The combination of the circle of chairs, and full daylight, plus with instructions on chairs, was just too much. So all of a sudden, there were reactions and questionings, and it almost began to feel like we were starting a big committee meeting, and that there was going to be some debate, and perhaps dissension. After all the good spirit of our previous four sessions, it seemed like we had lost our grace. We had suddenly been put back in school. (I half-expected an announcement over the PA: “Paul Winter…report to the principal’s office immediately!”)

I knew instantly it was my fault: I had forgotten to enable us to reclaim our freedom with an opening foursome. (We may, each of us, always need to do this, morningly, in our own way – recover, reclaim, our grace.)

Jane’s Rescue and the Recovery of Grace

As we were heading down this down-ward spiral path of discussing what we should do, re. Eve’s composition and all this structure, Jane saved the day by suggesting we do a four-some, first. That seemed like a way to get back on track. So four people came to sit in the center chairs, but there was a big gap around them, since folks were still on the outer ring of chairs, so we filled in that pregnant (I think also ominous) space by sitting on the floor around the foursome. And you know what I think? We regained our grace immediately, even before their sounds began. We overcame…disappeared…that old life-long awkwardness associated with all the rows of chairs in all the schoolrooms and churches and concert halls we’ve sat in for tens of thousands of hours in our lives. The foursome went beautifully. And Eve’s piece went swimmingly, with everyone participating, and many then congratulated and thanked her. We were back on track, seemingly happy “rowers,” Rowe-ing our boat together gently down the stream again.

It was a revelation to see/hear how quickly we can “lose it” – how fragile this community spirit can seem – but then also how quickly we can regain it. The initial pessimism gives way to a strengthened optimism…that this “grace,” of communing, must be in our nature, our instincts, genes, faculties…as it is (in my observances) when we are together in nature. A meta-lesson could be that these instincts for expression and spontaneous communing are deep and strong in us, in our nature, and simply need to have a context that awakens and gives license to them.

And also, the fact that we can “lose” it, and get it back countless times, means we can begin to let go of our fear of losing whatever it is. This is what I call the “Lost and Found Principle.” It applies also within the free-playing.  You may get lost often in the process of collective sound-play, and not know what to do next. And maybe you sit quietly awhile, till something pulls you back in; and then you’re “found” again…you’ve found your way once again. Once you’ve been lost and then found yourself multiple times, then the fear of being lost can fade away, since you’ve become an expert in finding yourself.

A Garden of Yes

Eve’s “composition” was simply another adventure, a little more structured than others we’d done, but right up the alley of a weekend of “Adventures in Sound Play.” We need to be able to imagine and invent all kinds of adventures for our expression, spontaneous or planned, with all sorts of combinations of the two. And all adventures have risk; risk is inherent in the nature of adventure. Any expression can be a risk, but we can learn to live with that. Expression is our birthright, our nature; and humans are the only species who censor their expression.

There needs to be a place, a space (even for a weekend, or a minute) where each person is totally all right, just as they are, right then and there…where whatever they do, play, or say, is all right…is totally fine. For maybe this can enable/evoke a break-through, an experience of freedom…or self-acceptance…or connectedness…a place of grace, we might say…that can stay in the body-memory. Even when you return to the old familiar contexts you might remember this experience: “I soared,” or “I felt at home,” or “I felt good about me.” To have an epiphany like this, even for a moment, is a triumph.

My sense is that many of us say “No” to our expression. Maybe somebody said “No” to us, back in the 4th grade, or said we didn’t have “talent”; and we bought it, and shut down; and ever after have always said “No” to ourselves.

So my resolve, from when David Darling and I began doing these “adventure playgrounds” back in the ‘70s, was that if it’s going to be effective for the shyest one among us, or for the shyest side of any one of us, then it must be a Garden of Yes, for any expression within civility. So – you want to try something? “Yes.”; You want to say that you don’t like something? “Yes.”; You want to sit this one out? “Yes.” Etc.

Four Heads Together

My last epiphany that morning was after everyone had sat knee-to-knee in groups of 4, with hands piled atop hands in the middle, and then fore-heads resting on the hands, with tops of heads touching. The idea in this is to hum, and listen to each other through the tops of our heads. The six little groups went happily humming for a long time, sounding like beehives around the room.

Eventually, as expected, one by one, the groups stopped humming, and the members sat up straight, usually laughing, and began talking with each other. I fully expected that there’d be a little talking, till all the groups were sitting up, and then they’d look to me for whatever was to happen next. But what was amazing was the talking didn’t stop. It went on and on, as if what the members of each group had to say to each other was the most important thing in the world at that moment. I was waiting for someone to break ranks and maybe raise a complaint: ‘Hey, what’s going on? I thought we were here to make music. What’s all this talking?’ But no one did. And these animated group conversations went on for 20 minutes. I sat there amazed. It was wonderful. And you know what it was, to me? It was life…life as a kind of music. And then I realized, wasn’t that the title of the weekend? “Music as life.” (“Life as music.”)

My Lone Ranger Moment

I’ve often said my goal in these events is to have everyone’s experiences grow to the place where they no longer need me or any other facilitator, and I could slip out unnoticed. (If any of you are old enough to remember the Lone Ranger radio series, in which at the end of each episode, after the Lone Ranger has done a good deed, he and Tonto gallop out of town while the townspeople stand watching, scratching their heads, and a gravelly-voiced “Gabby Hayes” says: “You know who that masked man was?…That was….the Lone….Ranger.”)

Well, who was that bald-headed sax player?

If you find out, let me know.

Love to all,
Paul

“Music: Physician for Times to Come” Anthology compiled by Don Campbell, 2000.

I have been involved with music in the realm of “performing art” all my life, but I am equally excited about the possibilities that music-making holds for all people and for its ability to heal what seems to me a chronic imbalance in modern life: our predominately visual mode of experiencing the world.

Playing music brings me to wholeness more than anything I know. It awakens a deep sense of optimism and brings me often into a kind of exalted state, resonating with feelings of gratitude and reverence for life. I have often wondered: Should this experience be available only to professional musicians, or just to people who have taken lessons or who have been deemed to possess this mythical thing called “talent” (which I feel is one of the more injurious concepts of our culture)? Or is the musical mode part of our birthright as human beings?

I marvel at the effervescence of my three-year-old daughter. Observing her propensity for making sounds – singing little improvised ditties to herself as she plays and imitating with great amusement the sounds of animals – I wonder what role music will play in her future. I dream of a life path for her that will remain true to the wondrous spirit she manifests as a toddler, in her honesty of expression, her unbridled spontaneity, and her total delight in the sounds and sights around her. Could a young life immersed in sound-play and music-making lead her onto a deeper path than that of the competitive consumerism of our culture? This little being seems to live in a state of integral balance among her faculties. I can’t help but believe that as we continue our journey into adulthood, we still have within us some of this childhood capacity for authentic expression and for appropriate relationships with the entire family of life.

What happens along the way? Where do we lose it? How might we recover it? Looking into the mirror (or, should I say, listening to the sounding board) of other species gives me clues and encouragement. I have come to realize that in many ways our species is very much still in its childhood. Among the greater community of ten million species on Earth, we Homo sapiens are the youngest of all. Wolves, for example, have a lineage of some thirty million years, while that of our own, as “big brain” humans, may only be about three hundred thousand years – only one-hundredth as long. It is humbling to realize that all other living species have learned how to live in harmonious relationship with their environments, or they would have ceased to exist long ago. We humans, however, seem hell-bent on destroying not only our own environment but the habitats of all other members of the Earth community as well. In truth, at this stage of our journey, we are more like a juvenile delinquent than an innocent child. What might we learn from these elder species about finding an integration of our faculties and instincts that may be more true to our own deeper nature?

My enthusiasm for the powers of music prompts me to ask: What is it we want, in our quest for “healing”? Is it simply to be free of illness or discomfort, to just get us back to the status quo? Or do we aspire to a wholeness, a fullness in which the wellsprings of our potential are uncorked and the enthusiasm of our life-song – whether as teacher or mother or fisherman or sax-player – is manifest in our voice, our smile, our relationships, and our livelihood?

I resonate with the words of my cosmologist friend, Brian Swimme: “My wild idea is that we reinvent ourselves and our society from the assumption that music is the central power of the universe. I propose that until we recognize this and organize our lives in ways congruent with this fact we will only deepen the planetary misery. A wild idea, yes. But I am convinced that only wild ideas offer any real hope for the Earth.”

I propose, with the license for optimism given me by sound-play, that these simple sonic rituals, these prescriptions of “Vitamin M,” may be among the most transformative things we can do. Through we can be brought back to “beginners mind,” with the child in each of us reawakened by our allurement to sound and our natural yearning to resonate with the world.

Each morning, as we hum or chant or strum or drum, we can celebrate the renewal of our path, our life-song, or the journey of our fledgling species, with our own humble offering of this glorious gift called music.

Paul Winter’s 18th Annual Summer Solstice Celebration

Greet the dawn of the longest day of the year in an acoustic adventure
with the Paul Winter Consort and special guests.

June 22, 2013, 4:30 a.m
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047, Amsterdam Avenue., Manhattan, NY 10025

[ BUY TICKETS ][VISIT THE WEBSITE]

Imagine yourself inside the world’s largest Gothic cathedral in the predawn darkness as the canyon-esque space resounds with music, and the great stained-glass windows are gradually illuminated by the first sunrise of summer. 

Paul Winter has long regarded the time of summer solstice as an auspicious opportunity for music-making. From the lineage of this event, over the past decade, has come a body of acclaimed live recordings, including Winter’s 1999 Grammy-winning album Celtic Solstice, with Davy Spillane, Karan Casey, Joanie Madden, and Eileen Ivers; and his Grammy-nominated album Journey with the Sun, in 2001, featuring Mickey Hart, Arto Tuncboyaciyan, Niamh Parsons, and Spillane.

Winter explains his affinity for this milestone, along with his aspiration for the event: Summer solstice is one of the great turning points of the year, when the sun is at its peak and the days abound with the promise of life’s fullness. It is a serenely powerful time in which the beauty of the natural world can infuse our spirit, bring us alive to the present, and perhaps awaken a deeper sense of relatedness to the community of life, to the Earth, and to the cosmos.

My dream, with this sunrise celebration, is to offer an experience of this resonance, through a deep-listening journey in the mystical ambience of these early morning hours within the awesome space and acoustics of this largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Our music begins in total darkness, and proceeds in a continuum, emanating from different places in the Cathedral. Gradually, as the great stained-glass windows slowly illuminate, the light joins the sound to carry us into the full dawning of the summer.

In the same way that these longest days of the year in June are the polar opposite to December’s longest nights of the year, the simplicity of this all-acoustic Summer Solstice Sunrise Celebration is in total contrast to the highly theatrical Winter Solstice Celebrations that the Consort has presented at the Cathedral over the past 30 years. Winter welcomes this opportunity to present a more intimate and reflective musical journey, in which players and listeners alike can revel in the extraordinary acoustics of the 150-foot dome of the Cathedral. Winter calls it “our most profound event of the year.”

You can go home again!

Almost 19 years ago, I deepened my experience of freely improvised music with Paul Winter in a Living Music Village held at Omega. This past weekend he offered a shorter and similar workshop in Virginia. Again he kindled something profound in me, and an appreciation for how important it is to help others rediscover their innate spontaneous expression.  I truly enjoyed all the ways we all made music, even those who had no musical training. Given attentive listening, satisfying music can be made with 3 or 4 people without uttering one word of instruction or planning.

This idea has expanded in my experience to include all modes of expression. Viewing a sunset across a Virginia valley delivered such a profound experience that I wondered the next morning if perhaps there was a poem there. (see poem below)

When I shared my belief that the medium of expression really doesn’t matter, it struck something in Paul. He said this was the opposite of what communication theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” In my experience, to express what happens at any given moment, any medium of expression is fine. The Now can be expressed in music, words, dance, visual art, photography, or just in appreciative silence, alone or with others. The mere act of noticing and paying attention is enough. - Blaise Kielar

Exquisite Silence

Mountain ridge
panoramic view
sky draining of blue and white
and flowing
towards the brilliant orange fire
of sunset.

Distant lines
of hills and peaks
transform
from smoky gray
to an inky purple,
in sharp relief
to the pale parchment
of the sky.

The colors write
their slow moving story
on my eyes,
which find patterns
in the golds
as well as
in the wispy grays.

My ears then trump it all
with a revelation –
I am bathed in perfect silence.

No sounds
of modern life
intrude
upon this gift,
no insects buzz,
no wind sighs.

And from this well
of deepest peace
a sense of oneness
arises.

There is no veil,
no barrier,
no difference at all.
Communion is served
to all my senses,
yet those senses
have been left behind.

The silence,
the dark,
the stillness,
all profound.

In this emptiness
are anchored
all sound,
all sight,
all motion.
Every sensation
born from naught.

The wind gently
pulls me back –
the sunset and I return.
Now
less an object and observer
and more
love regarding love,
in different forms.

poem written by Blaise Kielar, March 2013

A Holiday Celebration on a Spectacular Scale

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

Winter Solstice is a contemporary take on ancient solstice rituals, when people came together during the longest night of the year to celebrate the turning point in the Earth’s journey around the sun, and the birth of a new year. Now in its 33rd year, this cross-cultural performance within the awe-inspiring space of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine has become one of New York’s favorite holiday events.

When:        Thursday, Dec. 20 – 8 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 21 – 8 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 22 – 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 available after Labor Day
Purchase Online
or call OvationTix: 866-811-4111

Visit SolsticeConcert.com
- free download album (10 tracks)
- videos from past solstice concerts
- tickets and travel details

Recordings of the Winter Solstice Celebrations include Silver Solstice, which  commemorates the 25th Annual Winter Solstice Celebration a musical feast from the cornucopia of cultures and creatures of the world, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Join us as we greet the dawn with our 18th Annual Summer Solstice,

June 22, 2013, 4.30am

Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York

Photo by Clifford A. Sobel
Paul Winter, right, at the 2011 edition of his Winter Solstice concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The concert is now in its 33rd year.

The annual Winter Solstice revelries at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—feasts for the ears and eyes created by the renowned saxophonist Paul Winter for the world’s largest Anglican church—are celebrating their 33rd anniversary this week for three days beginning Thursday. And “celebration” is the word. Mr. Winter’s trademark approach embraces the sounds of the Earth—from world-class cities and third-world villages to the enchanting music of the animal kingdom—in a theatrical show that typically draws an audience of up to 2,500.

There are always dramatic surprises. In the past, Mr. Winter, who is 73, has scampered up to the rafters with his soprano saxophone to serenade audiences from above, his sweet tones swirling overhead like a gently falling snow; or featured a solo percussionist striking a giant sun-gong as player and instrument were slowly levitated 12 stories to the ceiling. Performers this year will include Mr. Winter’s musical consort, the African dance troupe Forces of Nature, griot singer Abdoulaye Diabaté from Mali, vocalist Theresa Thomason, and members of Mr. Winter’s original sextet.

His collaboration with the cathedral dates back to 1977, when its then-dean, James Parks Morton, invited him to play.

“I didn’t feel ready,” Mr. Winter said. “I had first visited the cathedral in May of 1974, for Duke Ellington’s funeral. Hearing Ella Fitzgerald sing ‘In My Solitude’ with 4,000 people in attendance was astounding. And as I left there was a recording of Johnny Hodges playing, and it sounded like it was coming from heaven. I felt that if I ever played there it would have to be something special.”

Dean Morton tried again in 1978 and then in 1979, when the two men were having lunch with tai-chi master Al Huang. Mr. Huang envisioned a dance program called “The Tao of Bach”; Mr. Winter had always wanted to present something he would call “Consorting With Bach.” On the spot, Dean Morton picked a date for their dual presentation. Since then, said Mr. Winter, his artistic residency at the church “has evolved like a garden.”

Mr. Winter’s artistic development uniquely qualifies him for that task. The early sextet with Mr. Winter on alto saxophone was a typically brash 1960s hard-swinging jazz group. But a 1962 State Department-sponsored tour of Latin America exposed the group to new ideas. In Brazil, he discovered “a new aesthetic—quiet and lyrical. There was bossa nova. We were all enthralled. We had been immersed in the testosterone-driven energy of our late teens, but this music was alluring. I wanted to find a way to play quietly without being wimpy. The saxophone player who had mastered that art was Stan Getz, and he became a big influence.”

He said he began to search for another approach to his horn. “Someone suggested Joe Allard, the dean of sax teachers, and I told him what I was looking for. ‘Do you want to play with a day sound or a night sound?’ he asked. ‘A night sound,’ I told him.

“Every lesson was about anatomy—the position of the tongue in the mouth, the relationship of the feeling in the vocal box to the pressure on the reed. And he had me change to a very strong reed. Really, I wanted to sound like a French Horn,” Mr. Winter said. “And every time I left a lesson, I’d shake my head and think, ‘I’ll never be able to do this.’”

But he did, and moved to Brazil, where his sound became further infused with what he describes as a uniquely Brazilian sense of longing. “Glad to be unhappy,” is the way he puts it. It’s a sentiment often found, he noted, in the sounds of the animal world.

Mr. Winter’s deep connection with nature might be traced to a brief stop at the Grand Canyon during his touring with that original band. “I remember sitting on the edge of the south rim of the Canyon and playing for fun,” he said, “just listening to the sound disappear in the sea of air between me and the north rim, 13 miles across.” Then, in 1967, he attended a lecture by biologist Roger Payne about whale song. “I was moved by their voices, which had a poignancy—like a cross between Miles Davis’s trumpet and an elephant. That night opened the door for me to the greater symphony of the earth.”

Later, he became engrossed by the cries of wolves. He began to integrate animal sounds into his works, often with stunning success. His recording “Common Ground” is perhaps the best-known example. The solstice celebration will include some of this.

The Winter Solstice, said Mr. Winter, is an aural tapestry of the world we share. “I’d like people to come with a sense of adventure,” he said. “I want to take them on a journey, and bring them home.”

A version of this article appeared December 11, 2012, on page A27 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Winter’s Wonderland Is Warmer Than Ever.

Excerpt from the CBS Eyewitness News program “The New Beat” about the Bossa Nova:

Silent movie of the Nov. 19, 1962 White House performance:

<– Return to album page: Count Me In

Abdel Salaam

Abdel Salaam is the artistic director, choreographer and a co-founder in 1981 of New York’s Forces of Nature Dance Theatre. Their 25 dancers and drummers will perform at this year’s Winter Solstice Celebration, as they have for two decades. Recently we spoke with him about his life and artistic vision:

I started music lessons when I was 5 or 6, learning piano with Zelma White in a small tenement hours at 117^th, between Fifth and Madison. We studied the classical composers, from Bach to Grieg and Brahms. We would study musical scale, music theory, and we would play varieties of melodies and chord changes on the xylophone or glockenspiel, and whatever we could eke out on piano. That initial introduction to music was at the instigation of my father, who was not a classical musician, but was part of the Harlem Renaissance Movement. My father took me, from a very young age, backstage to the Apollo Theater and to the Theresa Hotel when they used to have a stage, and so I heard Bird and Coleman Hawkins and a variety of people.

After Brown versus Board of Education, they started taking two kids from each of the schools in Harlem and transferring them downtown to the more affluent schools. So I was one of two children transferred from PS 103 on 120^th and Madison to PS 6 at 86th and Madison. This new school was for wealthy kids, pulling up in limousines and having charge accounts, and this blew my mind. The school had extremely well developed music programs, and in 5^th grade I started studying viola. Thanks to Zelma White, I had an ear for chordal structure, melodic lines and composition. In Junior High School I met a young German American oboe player, Jimmy Hahn, trained as classical oboist, but he was a jazz enthusiast, and thanks to my father, I was too. And so in Junior High I started playing alto sax. I decided I really wanted to be a jazz musician. Even though Jimmy and I were only 11 or 12, we had membership cards to the Dome Club and we’d go to Red Garter and Birdland. In those days, there weren’t the same restrictions on young people going into a club – we weren’t drinking, we just came to listen – to people like Coltrane and Sonny Rawlins.

I got to be pretty proficient on sax. I took that enthusiasm and passion to audition for the High School of Music and Art, and was accepted on saxophone. But in the first two weeks, the school said they had taken too many sax players, had filled their quota of “bastard” instruments (so-called because they were not played in a classical symphony orchestra, so there was some of that attitude of elitism) and the bands were filled. If I wanted to continue to go to that school I would have to play a classical instrument. So they put me back on viola, even though I came in on sax and wanted to be a jazz musician. I played viola for the next three years. Even though I love classical music, it kind of killed my musical passion. I probably needed to have a better musical support through school and I didn’t find it there. So I was a young kid who became very disillusioned. Even though I got great marks in composition, and orchestration, and conducting, I was very disillusioned and didn’t know where I was going to go with that as a career.

I was almost drafted for Vietman, but then I got accepted on a ghetto scholarship program to Lehman College. For the first year and half I was still not sure what I wanted to do. But I ran into Stony and Tommy Browder who went on to form the band Savannah, and I started playing alto again, with them. We did a couple of TV shows and some recordings. Savannah was getting ready to take off when I met Joan Miller and started dancing. It was like a light bulb that went off. All of a sudden I just knew I was supposed to dance. Stony would call me and say, “Hey man, Savannah is getting ready to go on tour and we got a record deal.” That was probably my last opportunity as an instrumentalist to do something with a musical career, but I had been bitten by the dance bug.

Joan Miller was a social-political activist and the first African-American post-modern lesbian choreographer. She was forming her own company and was interested in the “new dance”, the dance on edge movement, developing her own choreographic language, which was message-oriented.  She was an activist through the arts on issues of gay rights and women’s empowerment, and dedicated to the civil rights movement. That impacted me. I began studying ballet and other forms, and around that time, Chuck Davis came up to Lehman and started teaching West African dance. He immediately put me in his apprentice unit – I’d been dancing barely a year. Joan had been grooming me to be a student member in her fledgling professional company. So I kept on dancing through school and studying at the Ailey School and Clark Center for the Performing Arts.  Joan took us City Center to see Ailey and New York City Ballet perform Choral Dances, one of Ailey’s less celebrated pieces. We came back to school at Lehman the next day for a post-concert discussion and everyone was heralding the individual ability of the dance artists.  I certainly enjoyed that too, but what had struck me, and what I wanted to talk about, were the entrances and exits, costumes and lighting. I saw it as a complete work of art, almost like a moving canvas.

For me, art was an expression of everything that made up a composition: the sound, the visual, the lighting and texture, the manipulation of light, space and time. And I found myself being involved and passionate about that – the manipulation of light, space and time, and bodies that can do that. All of it creates this mass that comes together in a perfect storm to make a work of art. So at my first dance concert, I was impacted by all the elements and nuances, not just the performers, but everything that I saw went into the making of that piece.

I was ready to sign a contract with Ailey, to leave college and join the Ailey Company. But I think I was a little scared. I didn’t really know what that meant. Also, I was a cultural nationalist, and I found that there were certain things I was getting out of the environment at Lehman that were more impactful on my way of thinking – I was committed to Black Studies, which were evolving at the time; the Black Power Movement meant a lot to me as a young African American man, as did the empowerment philosophy of the Panthers and the African American community and the nation of Islam. There were a whole bunch of things that were pulling us at the time, including the anti-war movement. I was as much a political activist as I was an artist, so the Ailey mindset would have turned me into a very different kind of dancer and artist. It just didn’t have enough magnetism for me to drop everything I was doing at the time: my complete passion for civil rights, Black Power and what became the African Diaspora for me, the struggle to heal, to be a part of trying to heal the problems that existed in the African American community. Also I had a passion for the environment. Environmental studies were new at the time. So I didn’t join Ailey, I stayed at Lehman and continued to work with Joan and Chuck and others.

I came to see that the arts were a tool to address all these things I cared about. Dance is a living language, a nonverbal communication through using the movement of the body as the instrument. Instead of a separate musical instrument to pick up and play, I found the struggle and challenge to use my body as a tool to speak completely absorbed me.

We’d had Western European history all our lives at school. So through Black Studies, the new acquisition of information and a historical perspective of who were as a black people, centered in the African experience, was something I became fascinated with. Black Studies took us into African mythology and spiritual systems and religion. And the solstice, even when celebrated in its European context, was something I was very familiar with. I knew about how the Council of Nicaea in the Fourth Century had taken the ancient myths and transferred the mythos of ancient pagan world onto the construct of Christianity in order to promote its acceptance. The solstice mythology of Sun was attributed to the Son. It was fascinating to me.

These are things I’ve been passionately connected to, but from the position, initially, of empowering the African American community to take those pieces of our cultural ancestral past, from our ancient archetypal mind as Jung says, and bring those images and ancient memories forward so we could be empowered to overcome the metaphorical darkness that existed within our own societies and move through the things that were holding us back from being an empowered people in Western own society, particularly within America.

So when Paul said he was celebrating the solstice at the Cathedral, I saw a fascinating correlation between the ancient traditions around the return of the light, the fusion of ancient pagan traditions and Christian thought, and ancient rite and ritual in African civilizations. I saw a relationship between his music and sense of staging and manipulating myth and light and sound and space to make this point about the importance of the rebirth of light and how it can impact society.

And I saw Paul’s fascination with the forces of nature, even though he wasn’t saying it like that. Gerald Massey says that if we look at ancient traditions, one of the things that consumed all aspects of human life was the fascination with and investigation into the forces of nature. That’s how I got the name for my dance company. Paul seemed to be fascinated with those same things I was. I had been doing choreography about birds, and seas, and African Diasporan empowerment – but even that included Native American and ancestral linkages and rites and ceremonies and how they could impact society. In the 1990s, I was putting on Kwanzaa Regeneration Night, around the time of Kwanzaa. I had developed a pretty substantial audience for that, and related the principles of the solstice and Christmas and New Year to Kwanzaa.

These were things I saw Paul doing for the American European community and for those who came to see Solstice, so it was a natural marriage for me.

I enjoy reshaping, recreating ritual. It’s simply a mode of practice that you can engage in, a discipline. If you engage in sacred or secular ritual, its repetition, its consistency, serves as a reminder of a variety of things that are important for you to do or come back to, and invoke that sense of internal commitment and personal power and purpose in your life to whatever it is the ritual is geared towards. Religious myth embodied through the construct of ritual empowers the human soul and spirit.

Photo by Clifford A. Sobel

“After 40 years of playing only the soprano saxophone, at this year’s Winter Solstice Celebration, I’ll also be playing an alto saxophone. It’s challenging to go back and try and get the edgy sound I used to have on alto. But I love playing them both. The soprano will be featured in pieces with the Paul Winter Consort, and the alto in pieces with the Paul Winter Sextet.

“From when I was eight through my time with the Sextet, my main instrument was alto sax. During the last year of the Sextet, in 1963, I got a soprano – I just was interested in it and liked the sound – and played that on some tracks on the last two Sextet albums. Then eventually, as the Consort emerged in the late 1960s, I came to favor the soprano. This was probably because it projected more than the alto, at least the way I played it, and especially outdoors – I was doing more outdoor playing then.

“When I came to find the complexity of playing two different horns was too much, I decided to focus on one – soprano – and see if I could find the voice I wanted, which was a cross between a French horn and the human voice.

“After the bebop years, when the Sextet ended in 1964, I went to Brazil and immersed myself in that music for the better part of a year. For the first time I was involved with quiet music as well as loud. Almost everything the Sextet had done was loud. I had had a brash bebop sound appropriate for the band, but now that I was involved with Brazilian music – I wanted to change the way I was playing to get a more vocal sound.”