Search - Paul Winter :: Anthems

The perfect anthology.

Bob Zeidler | Charlton, MA United States | 07/04/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This compilation album, billed as "Ten Years of Living Music," is the perfect starting place for any who wish to discover the artistry and talents of Paul Winter and Friends, a group that includes not only his Consort but a number of individual efforts as well. I have given this album to a number of friends for just that reason, and it seldom fails to have its intended effect: These friends then go on to explore a much wider range of Paul Winter's Living Music from which this album has been compiled.



The seventeen tracks on this generously-filled album are divided quite evenly into excerpts from Consort albums and excerpts from albums spotlighting, and produced by, individual Consort members and friends, including Oscar Castro-Neves, Eugene Friesen, Paul Halley and Denny Zeitlin. Two tracks are excerpted from Living Music albums curretnly (and hopefully temporarily) out of print, and thus deserve special mention: Eugene Friesen's "River Music" (from Friesen's Arms Around You album) and Denny Zeitlin's "Hymn" (from Zeitlin's Homecoming album). Anthems is well worth the price of admission just to hear these two tracks, which, respectively, represent Friesen at his most creative and manic in terms of his musical conceptualizing, scoring skills and over-the-top cello playing, and Zeitlin at his most poetic while improvising at the keyboard. These two selections alone would garner this album the five stars above. But the rest of the album surely doesn't disappoint, either. Oscar Castro-Neves' "Song for Joyce" (for guitar, piano and organ) was, to me, an instant classic, one of the finest things Castro-Neves has ever done.



An additional 10 years has transpired since the original release of this album, and the Paul Winter Consort and various musicians on the album have gone on to release many additional albums, including a two-CD compilation titled "Paul Winter's Greatest Hits," which can be found elsewhere at Amazon.com. I recommend that you check them all out. Anthems will serve you well as a roadmap in discovering them.



Bob Zeidler"