November 19, 1962: The Paul Winter Sextet Performs at the White House

November 19, 1962: For the 1st time, a jazz group performs at the White House. It's the Paul Winter Sextet. The group is racially integrated. As far as I can tell, the performance was not recorded, either audio or video.

Although rock and roll was now the dominant form of American popular music, it's a little bit of a surprise that President John F. Kennedy liked jazz, but less so when you consider that he counted Frank Sinatra as a friend. Cheap Joke Alert: Less surprising was that he would invite a "sextet." The term has nothing to do with sex: It just means that there were six members of the group.

A saxophonist from Altoona, Pennsylvania, Winter loved the bebop form of jazz pioneered in the 1940s by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Coming out of high school, he played in the Ringling Brothers Circus Band. He formed his Sextet while studying at Northwestern University outside Chicago. Encouraged by Gillespie, Columbia Records superscout John Hammond -- whose career spanned from signing Count Basie to signing Bruce Springsteen -- signed the Sextet to Columbia Records in 1961.

He was accepted at the Law School of the University of Virginia, founded by President and classical music fan and performer (violin) Thomas Jefferson, and of which JFK's brother, new Senator-elect Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, was a graduate. But before Winter could begin his studies there, the federal government asked the Sextet to go on a goodwill tour of Latin America. The performance at the White House was a reward, and originally suggested not by the President, but by the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.

In 1967, Winter formed the Paul Winter Consort, incorporating Latin musicians and their styles into his recordings and concerts, making him a pioneer of what came to be called "world music." In the 1970s, he began adding sounds of animals in the wild as background for his performances. In 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts took his album Road aboard the command module Endeavour to the Moon with them.

Between 1962 and 2011, Winter released 39 albums. Between 1993 and 2010, he won 6 Grammy Awards. As of November 19, 2022, he is still alive and performing, at age 83. As the sextet never had a permanent lineup, listing the others, and how long they lived, or if they are still living, would be a cumbersome task.

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November 19, 1962 was a Monday. Actress and director Jodie Foster was born.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. And neither the NBA nor the NHL scheduled any games. So there were no scores on this historic day.