Wolf Eyes - Paul Winter Consort

Wolf Eyes Timber Wolf, Paul Winter, David Darling (Living Earth Music, BMI) Paul Winter / soprano sax Eugene Friesen / cello Warren Bernhardt / piano Jeff Holmes /piano Oscar Castro-Neves / guitar, synthesizer Dave Carpenter / bass Timber Wolf recorded by Fred Harrington in the Superior National Forest, Minnesota "Wolf Eyes" is my honoring song to the Wolf, this remarkable creature who has been maligned and mistreated by humans for so long. The seed-theme comes from the howl of a Timber Wolf recorded by wolf biologist Fred Harrington in the Superior National Forest of Minnesota. I had the opportunity to go there with Fred to listen to the wolves. He and I would go into the forest at night and howl with our voices. Once in a while, on a lucky night, we would hear, way off in the distance, a kind of lonely and lazy voice begin to rise into the night. And then others would join, and before long there was this magnificent chorus holding forth. Hearing them in the night, I had the thought that we, as a much younger species, might learn something from these elders of ours, about the importance of that kind of ritual - of giving voice together each day, in whatever way we might choose. The title of this piece comes from the first experience I had looking into the eyes of a wolf up close. This was a captive wolf, who looked back at me directly with these deep amber eyes, in which I sensed not only his curiosity about me, but the wisdom of his 30 million years of heritage, more than 100 times as long as our species, Homo Sapiens, has been around. I've never been fully able to describe this feeling with words, so I'm grateful to have music to make an attempt.