PAUL WINTER’S ENVIRONMENT IS MUSIC

Soprano saxophonist/composer Paul Winter is not just a let-me-entertain-you musician--as a glance at his curriculum vitae indicates:

--He has integrated the sounds of animals--from the high, chattery cries of dolphins to the polyphonic, chorus-like bayings of wolf packs--into both recorded and live performances.

--He has picked unusual outdoor locations to play his instrument, such as on rafts next to gray whales and in secluded grottoes of the Grand Canyon.

--The Apollo 15 astronauts took his music on their lunar voyage and named two craters after his compositions.

--He participated in the September, 1985, Beyond War “SpaceBridge” PBS broadcast, playing his saxophone in San Francisco while a Soviet chorus sang simultaneously in Moscow.

--He has performed in concert before such environmental groups as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and was given an award of excellence for his conservation efforts by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Despite all this, the leader of the Paul Winter Consort--who once was an ardent be-bopper but now calls his multimusical expressions “Earth Jazz”--does not consider himself a cause-bearer but rather a musician who sees music as the best means to voice his caring and concern for the beauty of life.

“Underlying all I’ve done is an allurement to beauty,” the salt-and-pepper-bearded saxophonist said recently from his ocean-view hotel room in Santa Monica. “That’s why I love jazz. I love the beauty of those (instrumental) voices and the way that they’re used, and how they reflect our own love of life. And for me, being attracted to things in nature is just an extension of that. To write a piece of music about a wolf or a canyon isn’t any different than writing about some beautiful lady I’m in love with.”

Natural environments, particularly the wilderness habitat, have a special hold on Winter. “Visiting the wilderness is the most life-affirming of experiences, and the best way of getting in touch with myself,” he said. “I get a perspective on my place in the universe that I get nowhere else.”

Arizona’s Grand Canyon is just one place that fascinates the 46-year-old reed-man. He first saw the canyon in 1963. When he returned to visit it 10 years later, he visualized taking a group down into the canyon to play. “So, in 1980, I took the Consort on a river journey through the canyon,” he said, “thinking we’d make an album. But that trip made me realize that it was such a vast and overwhelming environment, one trip wasn’t enough.”

Since then, Winter has made three more 270-mile raft voyages through the canyon with his Consort: Glen Velez, percussion; Eugene Friesen, cello; Paul Halley, keyboards, and Steve Silverstein, woodwinds. The last two, in 1983 and 1985, resulted in his latest album, “Canyon” (Living Music), and a video, “Canyon Consort.”

About half of the music for both the LP and video was recorded in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, where Winter has been artist-in-residence since 1980. “I felt the ‘grand’ dimension of the Canyon needed the sound of a great pipe organ, such as the one in the cathedral,” he said.

Winter finds the Canyon to have special psyche-healing qualities. “A place like that truly puts you back together,” he noted. “You’re far more whole there than in your home because I think our natural environment is the out-of-doors, and whenever we visit it, we feel better. That’s where we’re supposed to be.”

It was a 1975 Greenpeace tour to the North Pacific that fully awakened Winter’s need to be in touch with the wilderness; it also introduced him to those massive mammals of the deep, the whales. “It’s wondrous to sit in a raft a few feet away from the one of the largest creatures that’s ever lived on the planet and watch it come up out of the water. When you’re that close to pure majesty, it’s a very humbling experience.”

Winter first heard tapes of the sounds of humpback whales in 1968, an experience that dramatically shifted his concept of making music. “Those sounds astounded me musically in the same way that (alto saxophonist) Charlie Parker did,” he said. This was a beautiful expression of the life spirit and the fact that it was coming from a whale rather than an alto sax didn’t make any difference.”

Born in the rural climes of Altoona, Pa., Winter played drums at 5 and clarinet at 6. “I had an early career as a prodigy,” he said. But by age 12, he’d had enough of virtuosity and the limelight. “I wanted to play with a group, and so I started one then, at 12. It’s been groups ever since.”

The attitude that music is just a part, and not all, of life came from Winter’s upbringing in Altoona. “In the school system, we were encouraged to be Renaissance boys and girls,” Winter said. “So, I was into Boy Scouts, math, horses, as well as music.”

After he was graduated from Northwestern University in 1962, Winter’s sextet won an intercollegiate jazz festival and appeared at the White House. This appearance led to the first of seven Columbia LPs and a State Department tour of South America in 1962, where the music of Brazil provided another change of musical focus.

“That was the first time I heard gentle music that had great soul,” Winter said. “Until then I had been playing loud be-bop, which I loved. But then I heard this gentle classical guitar and beautiful little percussion and I suddenly discovered the feminine dimension in music.

“At the same time, I started to hear symphonic instruments, that I had heard as child, in a jazz context. I wondered how oboes, cellos, etc., might sound improvising. So I came back from Brazil with the idea for the Consort, a new kind of group that would embrace the things I loved most about jazz, the classics and ethnic music.”

The Consort, formed in 1967, became a popular band and its “Icarus” LP (since reissued on Living Music) has become a classic. Several of the members achieved notoriety on their own, particularly Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Glenn Moore and the late Colin Walcott, who formed the group Oregon in the mid-’70s.

In 1972, Winter disbanded the Consort, as steady touring didn’t jell with the inner calm he was experiencing in wilderness areas. Also, he was beginning to hear his own music. “For most of that early Consort period,” Winter said, “we played everybody else’s music, but not mine. So I sort of stayed quiet and worked on my compositions.”

After five years of “quiet,” Winter re-formed the Consort. Two years later, he started Living Music Records, which has released such in-depth projects as the two-disc “Callings” LP, where the amazingly mellifluous voices of such wild creatures as orcas and sea lions serve as a basis for group improvisations, and his contemporary mass, “Missa Gaia.” Winter’s next recorded effort will be about Lake Baykal, which he calls “the Grand Canyon of the Soviet Union.”

In between his international jaunts and the 100 concert hall engagements he plays each year with his Consort, Winter stays at home on his 77-acre farm in Litchfield, Conn. “I live there not for the community; I live there for the woods and fields. It’s not something I decided; It chose me.”