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 (Living Music; October 19, 2010). 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.

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).
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