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Fifteen years ago when pianist/composer Paul Sullivan became a father, he decided that his definition of parenthood included being there when his son came home from school, shepherding him through Boy Scouts, knowing his friends, and, most of all, knowing him, so Sullivan downsized his musical career and “absolutely, very knowingly, stepped out of line for things like Grammy Awards.” And yet, last year that’s exactly what he received—a Grammy for Best New Age Album of 2006, Silver Solstice, recorded by the Paul Winter Consort, of which he has been the full-time keyboardist for the last eight years.
Sullivan’s career has been eclectic and extensive. He has performed with jazz masters like Benny Goodman, with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Pops, at the Village Vanguard and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, at opera houses in Japan, and on the mountaintops of Oregon and the dunes of the Negev Desert. He’s written music for the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and more scores than any other composer for Pilobolus Dance Theatre. He’s performed on and off Broadway, including with the original production of the musical Nine, which won a Tony Award for Best Musical. The recently premiered Lois Dodd Maine Masters documentary featured his soundtrack.
A resident of Brooklin, Sullivan maintains a recording studio a mile or so up the road in Sedgwick, where for almost 20 years, the area’s birds, stars, fireflies, sumptuous gardens, and brittle winter nights have fueled his compositions for CDs with titles like Nights in the Gardens of Maine and Circle ’Round the Seasons.
But his roots—city roots—go back to his 100% Irish family who let him finger the keys of the living room’s piano from the time he could reach them; to St. Gregory’s, the local parish in Dorchester, a working class section of Boston, where he grew up; and to the St. Paul Choir School, a world away across the city, where they fed him music and discipline in heaping doses every day of the week from fifth through eighth grade. Following his high school years at Phillips Exeter Academy, he went on to Yale and then, as he says, “the school of hard knocks” in New York City, where he played with the best of them.
Sullivan is both country and city, big world and small community, and all of that is reflected in his music, and in his eyes. He is comfortable wherever he lands. And these days he’s breaking out the suitcases with more regularity and exploring new territories. His son has just left for a residential high school, and with 12 CDs, three Indie Awards, the Paul Winter Consort recordings, and now the Grammy under his belt, Paul Sullivan is hell bent on finding out just where all of it can really take him.
You started playing when you were a toddler. Was music a big deal in your house?
No, it really wasn’t. We had a piano in the living room, and music was a language that I just seemed to understand. It made sense to me.
Did your family recognize that?
Well, put it this way, my mother always said the only babysitter she ever needed for me was the old Victrola. She’d stack up as many records as it could hold and she would place me in front of it. When she came back, I would still be right there.
Did you ever question your desire to be a professional musician?
Never. Although when I was a junior in college [Yale], I spent about 15 minutes with a jazz trumpet player who was teaching a master class. I had to pick him up at the train station. I’m driving along and suddenly I ask, “I’m planning on being a professional musician. It never occurred to me to question it. How do I know if I’m right?”
Could he answer you?
He laughed and told me to make a list of everything I could possibly do—not that I wanted to do, but could do. Being a musician was all I had on my list. There was my answer. When I look back now, I’d been sort of a professional musician since fifth grade.
Fifth grade?
That’s when I was selected for the choir school. It was a serious thing. I’d take the subway at 6 a.m. and I wouldn’t get home until 6 p.m. We did recording. We did touring. It was the first exposure I had to real working musicians. It was hard, but what I loved is that it plunged us into a world of truly professional expectations.
In the last 18 months, you’ve played in Paris and Rome, and All Souls in Bangor. How different is that!
Oh, are you kidding? I have sat with the princess of Japan in her box at the opera house when I was playing a concert and two days later been playing at the Penobscot Nursing Home. I’ve played there every month for the last 20 years. I love people. This may sound more high-falutin’ than it is, but I traverse classes and status levels very easily. Everyone is important.
How have you kept your hand in the industry over recent years?
I record and perform on my own, but a lot of my opportunities have been with Paul Winter. I started filling in with the group around 1980, but seven or eight years ago, I became the full-time keyboard player, and so I could have my life here in Maine and be a dad and husband, and still play all over the world fairly easily. Paul would book and I would show up and play.
How big is the Consort?
We’re a very changeable family. The core is about a handful of us, but Paul often adds in up to 40 other people. We might have 10 singers from Moscow, and five Brazilian percussionists, a singer from the Balkans, maybe an inland pipe player from Ireland, Native Americans and jazz people and African dancers. I’m best friends with so many people I’ve never been able to say hi to, and yet, if I ever showed up on their doorstep in Brazil or wherever it is, they wouldn’t let me go. They would take care of me, and it’s the same here.
How do you describe your music?
This has been a perennial problem for me. Two nights ago, I played a concert in which I played jazz, blues, my original pieces, Chopin, Ravel, and I improvised, too. So, please, you tell me.
Is that a problem?
Marketing, I’m sure it is. But less than it used to be with the Internet. There’s not quite so much need for the boxes, literally and figuratively. Regardless of the marketing challenges, I love that I can take my audience along to someplace they may never have anticipated, and they trust that where I am going will be exactly where they want to be although they never
knew it.
What would you say is one of the most unlikely influences you’ve had?
Maybe my earliest days of mystical Gregorian chants in those shadowy cathedrals on cold mornings as a child at the choir school. It’s a goose-pimply place that has always been in my heart. I was a little kid in, like, a Fellini movie. Shadow and candles and mumbled Latin. When we’d sing, we’d set the vault of the church ringing with our little voices.
It sounds so mysterious.
Life is mysterious. There’s always a sense of the unknown even in the known. My future is still unknown to me. I don’t know where I’m going to be playing, what I’m going to be playing, or who I’m going to be playing it for, or writing it for. I don’t know what it’s going to sound like. It’s scary, but I wouldn’t know any other way to do it.
Sullivan’s career has been eclectic and extensive. He has performed with jazz masters like Benny Goodman, with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Pops, at the Village Vanguard and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, at opera houses in Japan, and on the mountaintops of Oregon and the dunes of the Negev Desert. He’s written music for the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and more scores than any other composer for Pilobolus Dance Theatre. He’s performed on and off Broadway, including with the original production of the musical Nine, which won a Tony Award for Best Musical. The recently premiered Lois Dodd Maine Masters documentary featured his soundtrack.
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A resident of Brooklin, Sullivan maintains a recording studio a mile or so up the road in Sedgwick, where for almost 20 years, the area’s birds, stars, fireflies, sumptuous gardens, and brittle winter nights have fueled his compositions for CDs with titles like Nights in the Gardens of Maine and Circle ’Round the Seasons.
But his roots—city roots—go back to his 100% Irish family who let him finger the keys of the living room’s piano from the time he could reach them; to St. Gregory’s, the local parish in Dorchester, a working class section of Boston, where he grew up; and to the St. Paul Choir School, a world away across the city, where they fed him music and discipline in heaping doses every day of the week from fifth through eighth grade. Following his high school years at Phillips Exeter Academy, he went on to Yale and then, as he says, “the school of hard knocks” in New York City, where he played with the best of them.
Sullivan is both country and city, big world and small community, and all of that is reflected in his music, and in his eyes. He is comfortable wherever he lands. And these days he’s breaking out the suitcases with more regularity and exploring new territories. His son has just left for a residential high school, and with 12 CDs, three Indie Awards, the Paul Winter Consort recordings, and now the Grammy under his belt, Paul Sullivan is hell bent on finding out just where all of it can really take him.
You started playing when you were a toddler. Was music a big deal in your house?
No, it really wasn’t. We had a piano in the living room, and music was a language that I just seemed to understand. It made sense to me.
Did your family recognize that?
Well, put it this way, my mother always said the only babysitter she ever needed for me was the old Victrola. She’d stack up as many records as it could hold and she would place me in front of it. When she came back, I would still be right there.
Did you ever question your desire to be a professional musician?
Never. Although when I was a junior in college [Yale], I spent about 15 minutes with a jazz trumpet player who was teaching a master class. I had to pick him up at the train station. I’m driving along and suddenly I ask, “I’m planning on being a professional musician. It never occurred to me to question it. How do I know if I’m right?”
Could he answer you?
He laughed and told me to make a list of everything I could possibly do—not that I wanted to do, but could do. Being a musician was all I had on my list. There was my answer. When I look back now, I’d been sort of a professional musician since fifth grade.
Fifth grade?
That’s when I was selected for the choir school. It was a serious thing. I’d take the subway at 6 a.m. and I wouldn’t get home until 6 p.m. We did recording. We did touring. It was the first exposure I had to real working musicians. It was hard, but what I loved is that it plunged us into a world of truly professional expectations.
In the last 18 months, you’ve played in Paris and Rome, and All Souls in Bangor. How different is that!
Oh, are you kidding? I have sat with the princess of Japan in her box at the opera house when I was playing a concert and two days later been playing at the Penobscot Nursing Home. I’ve played there every month for the last 20 years. I love people. This may sound more high-falutin’ than it is, but I traverse classes and status levels very easily. Everyone is important.
How have you kept your hand in the industry over recent years?
I record and perform on my own, but a lot of my opportunities have been with Paul Winter. I started filling in with the group around 1980, but seven or eight years ago, I became the full-time keyboard player, and so I could have my life here in Maine and be a dad and husband, and still play all over the world fairly easily. Paul would book and I would show up and play.
How big is the Consort?
We’re a very changeable family. The core is about a handful of us, but Paul often adds in up to 40 other people. We might have 10 singers from Moscow, and five Brazilian percussionists, a singer from the Balkans, maybe an inland pipe player from Ireland, Native Americans and jazz people and African dancers. I’m best friends with so many people I’ve never been able to say hi to, and yet, if I ever showed up on their doorstep in Brazil or wherever it is, they wouldn’t let me go. They would take care of me, and it’s the same here.
How do you describe your music?
This has been a perennial problem for me. Two nights ago, I played a concert in which I played jazz, blues, my original pieces, Chopin, Ravel, and I improvised, too. So, please, you tell me.
Is that a problem?
Marketing, I’m sure it is. But less than it used to be with the Internet. There’s not quite so much need for the boxes, literally and figuratively. Regardless of the marketing challenges, I love that I can take my audience along to someplace they may never have anticipated, and they trust that where I am going will be exactly where they want to be although they never
knew it.
What would you say is one of the most unlikely influences you’ve had?
Maybe my earliest days of mystical Gregorian chants in those shadowy cathedrals on cold mornings as a child at the choir school. It’s a goose-pimply place that has always been in my heart. I was a little kid in, like, a Fellini movie. Shadow and candles and mumbled Latin. When we’d sing, we’d set the vault of the church ringing with our little voices.
It sounds so mysterious.
Life is mysterious. There’s always a sense of the unknown even in the known. My future is still unknown to me. I don’t know where I’m going to be playing, what I’m going to be playing, or who I’m going to be playing it for, or writing it for. I don’t know what it’s going to sound like. It’s scary, but I wouldn’t know any other way to do it.
