Monday, October 13, 2003

By: Kenneth Luck, PR Intern

WILMINGTON, NC – Paul Winter Consort will perform in the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Kenan Auditorium at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7. Founded by award-winning saxophonist, bandleader and composer Paul Winter, the group combines elements from various African, Asian and South American cultures with jazz. This is the third performance of UNCW’s eight-part Arts in Action series, and is co-presented with the UNCW Department of Music.

In Altoona, Pennsylvania at age 5, Paul Winter began playing drums, piano and clarinet and by the fourth grade added the saxophone. He played in small bands with his schoolmates, first in, The Little German Band, then a Dixieland band, and finally a nine-piece dance band, The Silver Liners. He embarked on his first professional tour at the age of seventeen.

At Northwestern University in Chicago Winter formed a jazz sextet, which won the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival and was signed to a contract with Columbia Records. In 1962, the U.S. State Department sent the, Paul Winter Sextet, on a six-month tour of twenty-three countries throughout Latin America. That tour provided Winter with a mingling of cultures and an exchange of musical and social ideas. The sextet became one of the first groups to assimilate the syncopations of Brazil’s bossa nova into its sound and later, at the invitation of Jackie Kennedy, it became the first jazz group to officially perform at the White House.

Winter says of his consort, “I borrowed the name, ‘consort’ from the ensembles of Shakespeare’s time, the house bands of the Elizabethan Theater, which blended woodwinds, strings and percussion. These were the same families of instruments I wanted to combine in our, ‘contemporary’ consort.”

In addition to Paul Winter Consort’s performance on Friday in Kenan Auditorium, they will perform Earth Mass/Missa Gaia in UNCW’s Warwick Center Ballroom at 2:00 p.m Saturday, Nov. 8. The Earth Mass/Missa Gaia, co-presented with the UNCW Department of Music and Church of the Servant, features live animals and other sounds from nature.

Tickets to the Friday night performance are $6 for UNCW students and children 12 and under, $12 for UNCW faculty/staff and seniors, and $18 for all others. For tickets, call the Kenan Auditorium box office at 910/962-3500 or 800/732-3643 outside of the Wilmington area. Box office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday.

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NOTE TO MEDIA: For additional information contact Assistant Director of Campus Activities and Involvement Center, Shannon Hooker at 910/962-7600 or visit http://www.uncw.edu/arts.