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The most common defense for insisting on genre classifications is that it “simplifies” discussions about music. According to Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (Penguin, 2021), “Devotion to a sound is essentially about community and belonging.”  In this sense, one can see adherence to genre norms as a shared creed for a community. In reality, however, crass labeling complicates far more than it clarifies. It isolates far more than it unites. This is seen especially well with soprano saxophonist Paul Winter and his longstanding ensemble, The Paul Winter Consort, on Horn of Plenty (Living Music, 2025).

For the past six decades, Winter has honed a sound uniquely his own. The Consort incorporates the improvisational ingenuity inherent in jazz. Winter was even – at the invitation of Jackie Kennedy – the first jazz musician to perform at the White House. However, calling Winter a jazz artist would likely make a purist like Stanley Crouch or Wynton Marsalis wince, and, if you insist upon applying a hard and fast label, they are not entirely wrong.

Maybe Winter is a new age musician? All six of the saxophonist’s Grammy Award wins have been in New Age categories, as are five of his other seven nominations. A 1987 Los Angeles Times article even called Winter, “one of the founding fathers of New Age music.” But the artist himself openly rejects the New Age label, so perhaps it should be discarded.

Perhaps then Winter is a folk musician? The Consort has long borrowed ideas from the people of cultures around the world. Stateside, he has worked with the legendary Pete Seeger. Winter also co-produced Pete (Living Music, 1996), which later won the singer-songwriter Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk album. In 1966, he even performed at the iconic festival Seeger co-created, the Newport Folk Festival. But one would be hard-pressed to push the Consort’s music into a “folk” bin. For one, Winter has expressed a general aversion to most vocal music, a cornerstone of the genre.

But if the Paul Winter Consort is not fully jazz, new age, or folk, what is it? One is left with the artist’s own self-created labels, but those, too, are problematic. Winter’s playful phrase “contemporary contrapuntal Connecticut country consort music” is too tongue-in-cheek to be taken seriously. His other descriptor, “earth music,” is more apt but also flawed. The Consort’s work has long incorporated field recordings of nature, such as whale songs, wolf howls, or bird calls. Yet Winter never contends such sounds are intended as musical. And his focus is not solely on the relationship between man and nature, but also more broadly between the individual, collective, and nature. Hence, a song like “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush” primarily sees how the North American bird’s songs can properly intersect with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, compositions known worldwide. As much as nature emerges throughout the Consort’s recordings, so do reflections on humanity itself.

And that is all without getting into the more subtle elements of the Consort’s output. For instance, Icarus (Epic, 1972) was produced by George Martin. Perhaps some hues of the other works of the so-called “Fifth Beatle” are embedded in the sound of the consort itself? The ensemble has also had a decades-long residency at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Have the incredible acoustics of the church shaped the ensemble’s trajectory to some degree?

So, we are best off kicking aside labels and looking at the Consort’s music itself. Horn of Plenty is a particularly excellent entry point for such an analysis. Born from an NPR request to create a radio hour celebrating Thanksgiving, the record is a culmination of a career fully on its own artistic trajectory. It visits both the Consort’s best-known works and several new ones. In a world that too often forces conformity, Winter followed his own path long ago and, in the words of Robert Frost, “that has made all the difference.” Detractors may call Horn of Plenty too polished or smooth. But such criticisms miss the bigger picture. What emerges is a music that is wonderfully tranquil and warmly inviting. Contributions from guests from around the globe emphasize a shared humanity, while the sounds of the animals more accurately place mankind in the vastness of creation. This is far more impactful than some arbitrary satisfaction of genre norms. The album is a musical call for peace, thoughtfulness, and gentleness, both to the environment and to one another. As we enter a new year, who could ask for more?

PostGenre: Before getting into your own music, you also produced one of Pete Seeger’s records, Pete?

Paul Winter: Oh, yes, I did.

PG: What got you involved with that project?

PW: It came from my reverence for Pete. The story goes back to June of ‘63 when I first heard Pete play. At the time, I was recording with my jazz sextet with our producer at Columbia, John Hammond. We were talking about what we might do for our fourth sextet album, which we were going to release that spring. In our discussion, the idea came up for us to explore something with folk music because folk music was becoming popular in the country then.

I told John that I didn’t know anything about American folk music. I knew something about Brazilian folk music because I had traveled there and been enthralled with a lot of their music. But I knew nothing about American folk music. So, John told me he was recording Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall the next week and suggested I come and sit in the booth with him during the concert.

Going and listening to Pete greatly changed my musical life. He was the first vocalist that I ever really liked. I was an instrumental kid and, growing up, I never cared much about vocal music in any genre. But Pete was different. He had an authentic voice. He wasn’t a singer exercising the showbiz technique of “listen to me or let me beguile you” that had always turned me off. He was an authentic person singing about real things in life. From that time on, I was intrigued with Pete.

The next year, 1964, I toured with Peter, Paul, and Mary for the Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign and became friends with them. That opened a new door for me. And, in 1966, I was at the Newport Folk Festival.

PG: You performed at the Newport Folk Festival?

PW: Yes, but not on the saxophone. I played there in 1966 on an amadinda, a three-person log xylophone from Uganda. I was invited to play there by Andrew and Paul Tracey, two musicians from South Africa who were in New York at that time with a show they had created called “Wait a Minim!” A minim is a musicological term for a half note. It was a musical satire revue against apartheid, and the Traceys played dozens of African instruments in the show. It also had many dances and songs with a cast of people from Africa.

PG: How did you end up playing the amadinda with them?

PW: I loved the show so much that I went twelve times to see it and ultimately got the nerve to go backstage to see if I could meet somebody from the show. I met Andrew Tracy, who was the leader of the show, and we got to talking. He asked if I had ever played mallet instruments. I told him I did not play any seriously, but he still invited me down to the basement of the theater because he wanted to show me something. Down in the basement, he showed me a log xylophone and a couple of the parts of the play’s score. They were simple parts, but interlocking. They were very ingenious. Then he said, “My brother and I have been invited to play this instrument in an afternoon educational performance at the Newport Folk Festival. Would you play with us? Would you be a third person on the instrument?” I told him I’d love to and then spent time with them before the performance to learn more about the instrument, so I could hold my own on it.

As we rehearsed the afternoon of our Newport performance, I concentrated heavily on my part. I needed to not only play the correct notes, but also play them in an interlocking way with the other players. It’s a musical technique called hocketing that required me to play in between the other musicians’ beats while going very fast. It is difficult, but it makes an amazing sound.

As we were rehearsing, I became aware that somebody was next to me, lying on the stage floor. I couldn’t take my eyes off the instrument in front of me to find out who it was. But when we finally stopped, I looked over and saw that it was Pete. He was intrigued with the instrument, and the reason he was on the floor was that he was trying to figure out how it was made.

That rehearsal led to a conversation backstage between Pete and me, which then led to our sharing notes and sharing ideas about different ethnic instruments that we found intriguing. Pete had recently returned from Trinidad with a bunch of steel drums because he wanted to make a marching steel drum band. I had come back from Brazil with a bunch of samba drums called surdos. Pete invited me to bring the surdos to his place sometime, and that was how we became friends. That was in the summer of 1966 and we remained friends for the rest of his life.

We also played together at various events. At one point, when Pete was in his 70s, I asked him what he was interested in and if he would ever consider making an album of his Earth Songs. But he told me his voice was shot by then. The only way he would record was if he were mixed in with a chorus. So, we got a chorus of singers from New York, from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; it was the Consort’s first decade of our continuing residency there.  We recorded it all in my barn. And that’s how the Pete album came into existence.

PG: Wow. As far as your residency at St. John the Divine, you have been presenting Winter Solstice Celebrations there for over forty years. What do you feel you have learned the most from doing those?

PW: Well, that’s a very good question. There are some universal things that people pick up on, even if they haven’t had direct exposure to them. During the winter, it seems that people have a deeper yearning to reconnect with each other. And the weather is a factor in that. I would like to think there’s some universal inclination toward acknowledging the solstice, even if only a momentary glimpse of the fact that we live in a solar system and that our star, the sun, is the source of life. I don’t think many people think about that often. But it’s been my optimistic hope over the decades that we’ve been doing the solstice celebrations that there is some chance it could spark something in people, even if only for a moment, to acknowledge our connection to the sun and weather. And of course, I’d love it to go deeper than that.

PG: As far as St. John the Divine itself, you have mentioned in other interviews the cathedral’s incredible acoustics. Do you feel that playing in that space every year, more or less, for such a long time, has changed how you perform?

PW: I don’t think it’s changed how we in the Consort perform. I think it’s certainly been an affirmation of our musical aesthetic. The way those  instruments sound in the cathedral is very encouraging. And it’s certainly been a tremendous nourishment to get to play there. It always is. Playing there has expanded our repertoire as we’ve had many different guests from different countries come and be featured with us. And we’ve had the chance to explore many different traditions there. But we’ve been on the path that we’re on now for a long time before we came to the cathedral in 1980.

PG: Do you feel that working with other instruments or musicians from around the world, or your work with Pete, has changed how you approach your own music with the Consort?

PW: No, not really. It’s just expanded our repertoire. But it’s an ongoing process. When you travel a good bit, you meet people, you hear new instruments and new traditions. That’s a great part of the fun.

PG: You come from a jazz background, but some people have described your work as a precursor to – though you have expressed your displeasure towards the term – new age music. There is also a classical element to your work. How do you define your own music? Does it even matter what label is put on it?

PW: Over the years, I’ve found that very often genre labels are misleading. I prefer to skip them and not bother with them. It’s so hard to describe music with words, and I don’t really have a genre label. Sometimes I’ve thought that what I’m aspiring to is a realm of earth music that celebrates the creatures and cultures of the whole earth. But calling something “earth music” doesn’t really give people an idea of what the music is about. It’s always a bit of a conundrum to label music.

Ultimately, the best labeling you can have is just your name. It’s so-and-so’s music. Because there are so many influences and the world is so full of diverse musical traditions, properly describing your music would require a very long and  hyphenated compilation of names. Actually, early on, in my first protest of genre labels, I would say my music is properly identified as “contemporary contrapuntal Connecticut country consort music.”

PG: [laughing]

PW: That was a good way to end the conversation.

PG: Do you feel it was harder to avoid genre labels back then than it might be now?

PW: Maybe it’s easier now. It might be. There’s no more record business and it was record labels that were always a stumbling block because marketing depended on genres. Early on, the Consort would be placed in many different genres. At the record store, we’d be in the classical bin, the jazz bin, the pop bin, or whatever. But, more often than not, we’d be nowhere. Record stores wouldn’t know where to put us. That was always frustrating to me, but it’s the way the business worked at that time.

PG: As for your music not being easily categorizable, in that sense, it also defies the Western musical status quo. You have expressed in other interviews that you are not a fan of avant-garde jazz. But you do not see, even while avoiding the harsher and free improvisation elements often associated with it, your own music as avant-garde in a way, because it steps away from the status quo?

PW: Not at all. That term never attracted me in any way. I think a lot of the Consort’s music is really old-fashioned. There are a lot of traditional elements in our repertoire. Contemporary is a fairly general term that, when used with music – or at least with classical music – implies cutting-edge avant-garde stuff. But I’m not really up on all of that. I don’t think of our music at all in relation to the term avant-garde as it was used in either jazz or classical music.

PG: One avant-garde classical composer, John Cage, saw all sound as music. You don’t ascribe to that view even though you incorporate into your music the sound of animals that we would, if open-minded enough, appreciate as musical?

PW: Yeah, you get into all kinds of semantics. I wouldn’t say that the animals are making music in the sense that we create music. They’re expressing themselves. They’re giving voice. And I find it highly musical in many cases. But, no, I wouldn’t say they’re making music. I think that the sounds they make have functional purposes in their lives. I’m sure there are situations where they’re moving toward ritual, like when wolves howl, that you could say is a musical experience. But that’s really up to the listener. I always say that beauty is in the ear of the behearer.

PG: What is your process for working with the sounds that they do make? Do you find a recording of, say, wolf howls that you find particularly interesting and then find a way to compose around it?

PW: You just said it. That’s it. Very simple. That’s the way I’ve incorporated any of the sounds that I’ve loved. When we added cello to the Consort fifty years ago, it was because I really fell in love with the cello and just wanted to hang out with the sound of the cello and a player who was willing to be adventurous. I wanted to find out what happened when I added the cello sound. Finding the recordings to use is a similar process. It’s all very much in the process of jazz, of improvising on various themes, rhythms, chord changes, or instrumental voices, and listening to hear what might happen. You listen for magic. It’s really simply that. It’s a quest for magic.

PG: You must typically listen to a lot of animal recordings to see what works with you.

PW: I’ve listened to a good many, sure. But I love the process and find it very interesting in the same way that I love listening to as many Bach pieces as I can find and to everything that Gil Evans made.

PG: As for Bach, one of your compositions, “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush” came about when you realized that the birdcall of a wood thrush corresponded well with two Bach compositions – “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and his “Cello Suite No. 1.” Do you think those connections between bird calls and those two pieces were the result of something intentional by Bach, perhaps in reference to other birds? Or was it merely coincidental?

PW: Well, I seriously doubt if Bach had any experience with wood thrushes. I actually don’t know if they had wood thrushes in Germany in his day. Or even if they have them there now. I haven’t heard about wood thrushes in Europe, though, obviously, they have other birds with their own calls. But, no, the way the calls connect with those pieces is an extraordinary musical miracle. It’s beyond coincidence. It’s something too amazing to stumble into, but the piece is a unique thing and was great fun to put together.

PG: Which, perhaps, raises the bigger question of where music comes from.

PW: That’s a great question. I think it’s beyond the scope of our discussion today. But it’s a good one. That would be a good one for you to explore.

PG: In terms of composing with bird calls in mind, do you draw much inspiration from Oliver Messiaen’s work exploring them?

PW: I love much of Messiaen’s work, but I’m more moved by his unique harmonic sense than his use of bird calls. The thing about incorporating themes that you transcribe from birds is that there’s no way the listener will know what it is unless you tell them. And I would love the music to speak for itself. I tell people in concerts that I am working with the call of a wood thrush because I like to share the story of how I found the connections between its call and the Bach piece. It’s a fun story.

But if we played the piece without explanation, I think listeners would still at least recognize the bird call as coming from a bird. But with Messiaen’s transcribed melodies, only a rare bird ornithologist would recognize the bird he is referencing. I don’t mean that as a negative comment about Messiaen, who is a towering musical figure. He just took another way to approach bird calls than I have. But there should be many ways of going about working with them, and Messiaen is certainly in my pantheon of great composers.

PG: In addition to some new pieces, Horn of Plenty features re-explorations of “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush” and several of your older works. What made you decide to revisit older pieces instead of presenting all new pieces?

PW: I wanted to make the point of the diversity of context that I’ve been fortunate to get to play in. That was really the premise of it. The album grew out of a radio program we did for NPR. Working on that program was the motivation for the album and its diversity. I also think that many people don’t know the music we recorded in the past. I wanted it represented on the album and to show how it has evolved as the Consort has continued to play it.

PG: You dedicated Horn of Plenty to Roger Payne. Do you remember how you first met him?

PW: Absolutely. On May 27, 1968, I went to one of Roger’s lecture presentations on humpback whale songs at Rockefeller University in New York. His presentation changed my life. I heard those beguiling whale voices that, at times, feel like some kind of underwater blues singer. And he taught us in that lecture that the whales sing patterns – ones that repeat again and again, sometimes as long as 30 minutes – that are as complex as one of [Ludwig Von] Beethoven’s symphonies. Then they repeat the entire long song verbatim again. All the male whales, because only the males sing, sing that same complicated during a season. Then, the next year, they all sing a new song. It’s all mind-blowing information.

I also learned from Roger’s lecture how whales were being exterminated for products like lipstick and dog food. All of those products could have been made more cheaply from sources on land, but the whaling industry was dying and trying to crank out the last profits it could.

PG: Conservation was an important part of Payne’s work. Do you see conservation as a major goal of music more generally?

PW: Well, it could be one of them, for sure. I know Roger’s album, Songs of the Humpback Whale (CRM, 1970), is an absolute milestone. It probably did more for whales than all of the books and talks put together.

PG: Do you think your work with the Consort has raised awareness for conservation, as well?

PW: Certainly, to some degree. It’s very hard to measure. But we have connected with many people over the decades who are working on various earth causes. It’s certainly been gratifying when they’ve told us that the music inspired them and affirmed what they were doing and what they cared about.

PG: Do you know of any younger musicians who are carrying the torch, so to speak, for earth music? It is difficult to think of one.

PW: I don’t know. I hope there are. There ought to be thousands. There’s certainly been enough music made about romantic love. I think that’s been covered well and will continue to be, and should be. But when I look at what’s missing, I realize that not many people have an awareness of how urban culture has subsumed our civilization. People do write music about climate change and other important environmental topics, but there are hundreds and thousands of ways to express their concerns, and they express themselves in the terms most familiar to them. You can only work with what you know, and it’s like nature is a distant realm for many people.

The Consort’s music is still a fairly well-kept secret. I’m not aware of too many young people who know our music or the songs of the whales. But that could change. I hope it does.

‘Horn of Plenty’ is out now on Living Music. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Paul Winter can be found on his website.

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