A Conversation with Stephanie Winters (continued)

PM: Which brings us up to date and to you pursuing your own music now as well. As avid a music listener as I've always been, I really don't know much about classical music. And aside from public radio, I don't even listen to it.

SW: Right.

PM: I'm not proud of that, but that's the case. And when I'm listening to public radio and I turn off a piece, I feel like the royalty in Amadeus because that's what I say, "Too many notes," just before I turn it off.

SW: [laughs]

PM: But I do love the sound, I just need compositions and ensembles that I relate to. And I resonated immediately with what you're doing in Through the Storm. And I think there's a veritably unlimited number of people out there who could have a similar reaction, that's why I'm so excited for you. I hear what you mean by classical crossover, and I got it because I found the music immensely listenable. So let's talk about some of the pieces on the record, who composed and arranged them, and what you had in mind. Let's begin with that extraordinary piece that translates as "Get Up, My Daughter." That's one of the prettiest things I've ever heard.

SW: "Stani Mi, Maytcho." Well, you know who's really the sort of invisible force behind a lot of this stuff is my producer, Alan Williams.

PM: Yes, we've got to talk about him, obviously.

SW: And you might even want to interview him a little bit, because I feel like I'm the cellist and the persona--and I do have an esthetic sensibility that is reflected in the album--but a lot of the choices and the arrangement stuff came from Alan.

PM: Who is this man?

SW: Alan Williams I actually met because he was Dar's music director. And he lives up in the Boston area. And he's had his own varied musical past. He had a band in the 90s called Knots & Crosses that was a regional success up in the New England area. But he had an extensive conservatory training too. He went to New England Conservatory and was in Gunther Schuller's Third Stream Studies, which is part of New England Conservatory's Contemporary Improv major. [Schuller founded this innovative program in 1973 to explore the "third stream" that is formed when the streams of classical music and jazz are combined.] So Alan is a totally trained musician, but he did that whole singer songwriter world too. And we met through my playing with Dar, and talked about the desire to do a multitrack cello CD. Alan ended up producing the Nude's third album. And then we had the idea of doing this multitrack album, which was supposed to be done in one summer, and went on for five years. [laughs]

PM: Really?

SW: Yeah.

PM: [laughs]

SW: Yeah, actually it's going to be six years this summer--which was the result of being overly ambitious, and also that Alan decided to go get his masters and doctorate in musicology, so that kind of slowed things down because he wasn't available during the school year. We had each January and the summer.

PM: Right. And along the way he'd become kind of indispensable in the process.

SW: Yes. So anyway, a lot of the selections and arrangement stuff was largely Alan. He had the idea of the Bulgarian Women's Choir piece, that's what that is, that he arranged for the cello sextet, for instance.

PM: That's what that is, it's a Bulgarian Women's Choir piece...

SW: Yeah. I think it's written as a sextet, and then I believe there are sections that are doubled, so I played the parts twice. And we went through a tremendous learning curve of how to multitrack. I got a lot better technically because there were so many hours--it was so labor intensive, that album. I mean, the title track is about thirty tracks of cello.

[The tape runs out, and I hurry to change it without overly busting the conversational groove. The artist is talking about a Miles Davis tune on the CD.]

PM: You were saying that you didn't know if you could pull off "Blue in Green" [from the classic Kind of Blue album].

SW: Yeah. But Alan pushed through. A lot of things morphed as they went along. I had recorded the solo parts for "Blue in Green," and then we ultimately agreed that we liked it better as just the piano. That's Bill Evans' piano part.

PM: Right.

SW: And he's supposed to have really written the piece, and Miles took credit for it. Or so I've heard.

PM: Are you kidding? I never heard that story.

SW: A few different people have told me that.

So yeah, "Through the Storm" Alan and I worked on together. And the "Cancao Verdes Anos" [Song of Green Years],which was really a classical guitar piece, Alan had the idea to do that--and then, after we had recorded it, Kronos Quartet did an arrangement and released it... [laughs]

PM: Damn. So is the composer Portuguese or Brazilian?

SW: I'm not really sure. I think it's almost like a folk tune or based on something like that. Everyone says it sounds like this, it sounds like that, some people say, "Oh, it sounds like 'Summertime'"--I think it's just one of those things that reaches people that way. [Written by Portuguese guitarist Carlos Parades, it first appeared in Paulo Rocha's 1963 movie Os Verdes Anos, said to signal the birth of the Portuguese Cinema Novo.]

And then my brother's piece, "Xenia"--

PM: That's an incredible piece.

SW: Yes. My brother actually did about five or six sketches of pieces. I liked this one the best and I took it to Alan. And we went back and forth in the mail a few times asking my brother to extend a section, change that, develop this idea more. And my brother did that. And then Alan and I sort of reassembled the structure of it.

PM: And I think the Ornette Coleman song "Lonley Woman" is terrific, too.

SW: Again, that was Alan's idea. And on that one I pushed for solo cello. Alan wanted me to do a duo, but at this point--this was one of the last things we did--I was thinking, "I really don't know how the hell I'm ever going to present this record. I need something solo." And I was pushing for solo for that reason, but also it just worked for me. So on that one--on "Lonely Woman" and "Cancao," Alan did the core arrangement and then we sort of hammered it into something. I remember in "Cancao" wanting to drop a verse and change the structure. I'm pretty opinionated about arrangements, and the sense of building and falling away, which in a way is an interpretive effect I'm bringing to the music. More than sitting down and writing the four cello parts--the credit for that stuff goes to Alan. I think he did an incredibly beautiful job.

PM: God bless him, yeah. It's fabulous.

SW: Yes, it really is.  continue

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