Windham Hill’s Winter Solstice tour returns
A “Jeopardy”-style question: Founded in a Palo Alto-area garage, this company disrupted an entrenched business model, opened new paths for innovators and radically expanded a previously untapped market.
What is … Hewlett-Packard? Apple? Google? In this case, the era-defining enterprise was Windham Hill, a record label that emerged in the 1980s as an instrumental music juggernaut, selling millions of records featuring acoustic tracks that elided distinctions among jazz, folk, classical and New Age music. Now that music distribution is dominated by Spotify and YouTube, it might sound like a fable. But once upon a time, a disparate roster of musicians such as acoustic guitarist Michael Hedges, electric bassist Michael Manring and the Turtle Island String Quartet opened up new sonic frontiers and sold oodles of albums.
The Windham Hill brand has faded since its catalog disappeared into the Sony universe more than a decade ago.
But one of the label’s flagship endeavors, a series of live performances dubbed the Windham Hill Winter Solstice Tour, reappears every year when the days grow short. After a canceled 2020 run, which would have marked the 35th anniversary of the platinumselling 1985 compilation “A Winter’s Solstice,” this year’s Winter Solstice production is scheduled for a string of shows at three Bay Area venues through Saturday, Dec. 18.
The program features the West Coast triumvirate of Albany multiinstrumentalist Barbara Higbie, Alameda cellist and vocalist Mia Pixley, and Portland multi-instrumentalist Todd Boston. Marking the season with a rising generation of artists and a renewed sense of purpose, the Windham Hill tour draws on a legacy of some two dozen winter-solstice-themed albums released by the label over the years.
Best known as a pianist who combines supple lyricism and exuberant rhythms, Higbie made a series of albums for Windham Hill in the 1980s with fiddler Darol Anger and the Montreux Band (and contributed a track to 1988’s “A Winter’s Solstice II”) while also recording for Olivia Records with singer-songwriter Teresa Trull.
A veteran of many Winter Solstice tours with former labelmates like guitarist Alex de Grassi, pianist Liz Story and guitarist Will Ackerman, who founded the label in his Palo Alto garage, Higbie is pleased that the latest iteration “is giving more space to younger players with a lot of fresh energy,” she said. “Mia and Todd use looping in an artistic way that really stretches the acoustic sound.”
Pixley, a clinical psychologist who uses her cello in her practice, first joined the Solstice tour in 2018 with Higbie, Ackerman and de Grassi. Even with her day job and parenthood, she’s popped up in a succession of creatively charged situations, contributing cello on Fantastic Negrito’s Grammy Award-winning album “Please Don’t Be Dead” and singing the title track on Negative Press Project’s “Eternal Life: Jeff Buckley Songs and Sounds.”
Shortly after releasing her first solo album as a singer-songwriter in July, “Margaret in the Wild,” Pixley collaborated with the de Young Museum, dancer-choreographer Kimberly Marie Olivier and the classical-meets-electronica organization Mercury Soul to create a video for her song “Everything Is Slow Motion,” a response to the legacy of racism and injustice.
As a Black artist, she sees the new Winter Solstice tour as a harbinger of change.
“It’s taking on some of the big shifts that have happened in the last two years,” she said. “Barbara is the ringleader, but we’re all supporting each other in a way that feels truly equal. We all perform our own stuff, but it’s way more egalitarian. Not that it wasn’t there before, but it’s much more intentional now.”
Like Pixley, Boston also recorded an album during the pandemic, delivering a soothing session of original tunes, “Hope.” And Higbie recently put out “Murmuration,” an allwomen session “that’s going back to my Windham Hill roots with chill instrumental music,” she said.
Featuring Pixley and other heavyweight players like percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Vicki Randle, it’s the second volume in a three-album series that she’s calling her “chillogy,” a project that unites her two primary musical streams, Windham Hill and women’s music.
She’ll be plunging back into the latter current when she returns to Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage, one of the Winter Solstice tour stops, on Jan. 14-15, with an all-star cast of women for singersongwriter Cris Williamson’s Grand Reunion concerts.
But for the moment, Higbie is focusing on creating a soundtrack for an ancient ritual celebrating rebirth and reconnection — and perhaps introducing some music history to a new generation in the process. For the first two concerts the headliners will be joined on several numbers by Voena, a children’s choir from Benicia, and 16-yearold mandolin phenomenon Jasper Manning, who will also be at the Carriage House “playing with us on some bluegrass pieces, all the real fast stuff,” Higbie said.