Whales and wolves and birds and more birds; soprano sax, keyboards and cyber-sounds – pioneering New Age sonic impressionist Paul Winter brought a veritable zoo to Caffe Lena Friday and Saturday. (This review is of the sold-out Friday performance.)
Paul Winter, left, soprano saxophone; Chuck Lamb, right, keyboards and computer playback
Performed with longtime Caffe jazz master and keyboardist Chuck Lamb, Winter’s “This Glorious Earth” blended natural sounds collected in decades of tape-recorded travels with fresh musings made live onstage Friday into an episodic, two-part oratorio. Its most compelling moments came when Winter and Lamb simply played together, without recorded accompaniment.
Espousing a connection with nature, the music felt spiritual, meditative.
A small mic clamped on his tunic carried the sound of Winter’s soprano sax via wireless transmitter to the house sound system where engineers Joe Deuel (house) and Joel Moss (broadcast, streaming) mixed it with Lamb’s acoustic piano, synthesizer, or computer-played recordings.
If this all sounds technically ambitious, it was; but also seamless in its intent and virtuosity. Both Winter and Lamb played well within their skill-sets, so everything had a non-swaggering, engaging confidence. Lamb cut loose more often than Winter, flowing free within the cozy spell cast by most of the music.
Humpback whales, wood thrushes, canyon wrens, wolves, and elk furnished wild sounds that Winter and Lamb used as guideposts for their live playing. Recorded animal calls sometimes inspired orchestral-scale recorded arrangements, as in the grandeur of “River Run” with djembe drum, or “Eagle Mountain” that combined European instrumentation, mostly low woodwinds, with brash massed Navajo (Dine´) chants. A recorded French horn echoed an elk’s call Winter’s crew had recorded in Yellowstone. At other times, the duo adopted a simpler approach with only sparse recorded accompaniment that afforded the live instruments more space. Many songs grew from melodies and rhythms the animals made.
Paul Winter, left; Chuck Lamb, right, at the computer
The balance of wild with man-made shifted throughout. In “North Fork Wolves in the Midnight Rain” – a typically euphonious title – Winter’s saxophone first engaged wolf calls in an equal dialog, then the wolves took over in a powerful, stirring chorus.
Winter cited visits to Connecticut forests, Montana prairies, the Rocky Mountains and, most often, the Grand Canyon and Colorado River as inspirations, both on tape and in his melodic imagination. Another current also flowed through the sold-out show: Brazilian bossas by Carlos Lyra whose “Coisa Mais Linda” (Most Beautiful Thing), for example, offered earthy rhythmic variety among long strands of meditative wanderings. This style returned later in “Wolf Eyes” where acoustic guitar and bossa rhythm flowed into a low-strings orchestral mood.
Winter finds sonic richness in the land as much as in its animals, basing “Canyon Chaconne” on a cliff formation whose long reverberation time approximates that in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine where Winter has been artist in residence for decades. This swelled in orchestral grandeur that well suited Winter’s Bach-like phrasing.
Winter used Leonard Nimoy’s authoritative voice in “The Voyage Home,” incorporating whale songs in reverent grandeur.
Winter played all night with eyes shut tight and he several times asked that both house and stage lights go dark. This aided in the achieving the abstract reveries that powered the music, as in the late highlight “Wolf Eyes” where he asked the crowd to howl together.
When, as Winter noted, the computer playback program “took a vacation,” he and Lamb skipped what would have been their last piece and jumped right to their planned encore: the familiar “Icarus” by Winter’s influential band the Paul Winter Consort that played at the crossroads of classical and jazz styles. The nearest thing to a hit Winter ever made, this brought the sold out crowd to its feet.
Hoke's Jukebox 