Paul McCandless
During a distinguished career spanning over four decades, Paul McCandless has brought the soaring lyricism in his playing and composing to the ensemble sound of two seminal iconic bands of jazz: the original Paul Winter Consort and the relentlessly innovative quartet Oregon.
McCandless specializes in the oboe, English horn, bass clarinet, soprano and sopranino saxophones, and a collection of folk flutes reflecting his grounding in both classical and jazz disciplines. Trained at the Manhattan School of Music, he was a finalist in the 1971 English horn auditions for the New York Philharmonic. Today, he says he is lucky not to have won those auditions, because a victory would have pulled him into the world of full-time classical performing, and he would have missed out on the rich life he has had in jazz....
read more
Paul McCandless
During a distinguished career spanning over four decades, Paul McCandless has brought the soaring lyricism in his playing and composing to the ensemble sound of two seminal iconic bands of jazz: the original Paul Winter Consort and the relentlessly innovative quartet Oregon.
McCandless specializes in the oboe, English horn, bass clarinet, soprano and sopranino saxophones, and a collection of folk flutes reflecting his grounding in both classical and jazz disciplines. Trained at the Manhattan School of Music, he was a finalist in the 1971 English horn auditions for the New York Philharmonic. Today, he says he is lucky not to have won those auditions, because a victory would have pulled him into the world of full-time classical performing, and he would have missed out on the rich life he has had in jazz.
As a collaborator and solo artist, McCandless has performed on more than two hundred albums and appeared with such renowned musicians as Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Wynton Marsalis, Lyle Mays, Mark Isham, Steve Reich, Al Jarreau, Bruce Hornsby, Art Lande, Carla Bley, Tony Furtado, the String Cheese Incident, Nguyên Lê, Proteus 7, Fred Simon, and many more. In 1996, McCandless won a GRAMMY for Best Pop Instrumental with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. With the Paul Winter Consort, he also won a GRAMMY in 2007 and 2011 for Best New Age Album.
Charged Particles
The most exciting and creative music being made today crosses stylistic boundaries and blends diverse traditions to create engaging new sounds. Charged Particles features three of the country’s virtuosos doing just that in the electric jazz arena. Murray Low is a keyboard wizard with dazzling Latin-jazz technique and imaginative improvisational skills. Aaron Germain is an inventive and sophisticated acoustic and electric bassist. Along with fiery drummer Jon Krosnick, these players are making some of the most electrifying jazz in the country today.
The trio’s repertoire blends jazz with elements of Latin music, funk, classical music, and other genres. The group’s original compositions are mixtures of complex orchestration and elaborate improvised solos. The band brings a similar approach to playing arrangements of tunes by other jazz artists and traditional jazz standards by the composers of America’s most popular songs from decades ago, each played with a new twist.
The band’s most recent innovation has been its collaboration with Paul McCandless, who plays his own compositions. The group has been appearing as headliners at the famed jazz clubs Birdland (New York City), Blues Alley (Washington, DC), Yoshi’s (San Francisco), and Nighttown (Cleveland), as well as at the Erie Blues and Jazz Festival, the San Luis Obispo Jazz Festival, the Stanford Jazz Festival, and other venues around California and the East Coast.
show less
