Nature in Winter Veteran musician’s consort celebrates all creatures, cultures of earth

It is a sound that drives record store managers crazy.

Under what heading do you file CDs by a group that has ties to both jazz and classical traditions, while adding in dashes of non-Western rhythms, and sometimes performs with whales and eagles singing backup?

Paul Winter, composer and saxophonist, who performs at 7:30 p.m. Friday with the Paul Winter Consort at the Strom Auditorium at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, doesn’t sweat the category dilemma. Bay Chamber Concerts is hosting the concert.

At 63, Winter has been at this a long time. The consort’s sound – instrumental music that is ethereal, joyful, meditative and soulful – pre-dates the soothing acoustic music popularized in the early- and mid-1980s on the Windham Hill record label, yet Winter often is associated with that genre.

How does Winter react to being lumped together with “New Age” music, a term that is used derisively as often as it is not?

“With humor,” he said in a telephone interview from his Litchfield, Conn., base, where he operates Living Music Records. After all, the beige-on-beige sound of New Age might be the perfect accompaniment for doing yoga or getting a massage, but Winter’s music challenges with multiple textures and polyrhythms, even as it casts a spell that might put listeners in a reflective mood.

“We really never felt very kindred to that music,” he said of the Windham Hill sound, “but in an era when most pop music had become electric, we were acoustic,” so record stores made the connection.

“In the early years of the consort, in the early ’70s, we weren’t put in any category,” Winter explained, as critics, promoters and record distributors struggled to pigeonhole music that could be seen as folk, jazz or even pop.

The consort won Grammys for “Spanish Angel” and “Prayer for the Wild Things,” the latter in the Best New Age Album category. But more recently, the consort is included in the World Music category, which suits Winter just fine.

“What we try to do is celebrate the creatures and the cultures of the whole Earth,” he said, drawing on European, African and American musical traditions.

Several albums feature the consort playing to the recorded “songs” of humpback whales, wolves and eagles, and Friday’s performance will include some compositions with recorded sounds of nature accompanying the group. The performance is titled “A Celebration of Life,” and also will include slides shot by North

Haven artist Eric Hopkins, whose paintings are now on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.

The Consort’s music is also often described in spiritual terms, a connection Winter accepts, but tries to qualify, so as not to imply that a performance is like going to church.

“It’s a celebration of life, and the life of the spirit, a celebration of life on Earth,” he said.

But as much as the music focuses on the sublime beauty of the natural world, Winter stressed that though the Consort’s music is accessible, it is also demanding.

“It’s still adventurous,” he said. “We do tend to like music where there’s a lot going on.”

Along with Winter on soprano saxophone, the Consort includes cellist Eugene Friesen, percussionist Jamey Haddad, and pianist Paul Sullivan, a Blue Hill resident who has carved out his own niche with piano recordings featuring sounds from the natural world.

Sullivan has been playing with the Consort since 1983 and has become the group’s principal pianist in recent years.

Winter has performed several times in Maine, and has ties to the state beyond music. Since the early 1970s, he would visit the late Helen and Scott Nearing each summer at their homestead in Harborside. Winter now serves on the board of directors of the Good Life Center, the organization that carries on the Nearings’ work.

Winter also notes that Blue Hill resident Noel Paul Stookey produced his first two albums, in 1968 and 1969.

Coming up in the jazz tradition, Winter is no stranger to improvisation, but concedes, “I’m not always thrilled by 10-minute solos.”

“We’re drawn to music because of the adventure of playing music that’s interesting,” he said, aiming to create sounds that take the listener along.

He cites three albums by jazz-great Miles Davis, collaborating with arranger Gil Evans – “Miles Ahead,” “Sketches of Spain,” and “Porgy and Bess” – as major influences that are “among the best America ever produced.”

In the Miles Davis-Gil Evans work, as well as in the Consort’s music, “I love it when you don’t know what’s improvised and what’s not,” where the group “plays together like an organism,” Winter said.

“What I love to do most is interweave in various ways with my colleagues, and also, hopefully, with the audience. Come with an open mind and heart.”

“A Celebration of Life” begins at 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30, at Strom Auditorium, Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport. Tickets cost $25 and $18, $5 children. 236-2823, www.baychamberconcerts.org. Paul Winter will also conduct a music workshop, “Playing With Sound,’ 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, May 31, at the Lincoln Street Center for Arts and Education in Rockland. No musical experience is required, but participants are encouraged to bring some of kind of an instrument. The fee is $30; call 594-6490 to reserve a place.