Round about the time of his 70th birthday Paul Kantner, founder member (some would say ‘Founding Father’) of both Jefferson Airplane and its successor Jefferson Starship, started a new project. The Marin Independent Journal reported: 'Apparently, getting old is not on his agenda. At the moment, he's excited about the Windowpane Collective, a recording group that includes […] Novato's David Freiberg, who was in Quicksilver and the Starship; West Coast folkie Jack Traylor, an early idol of Kantner's, and the two women who replaced Slick in the Starship, Darby Gould and Cathy Richardson. Not that Kantner thinks of himself as exclusively a rock musician. His new Windowpane Collective is pretty eclectic. A notorious sci-fi buff, he and the group have done a Martian Christmas album, Venusian Love Songs for Valentine's Day, and they're looking to release a collections of Civil War and vintage folks songs. From the ambitious scope of the Windowpane Collective, Kantner doesn't seem to be lacking in youthful energy. "So far, so good," he said, disclosing his personal fountain of youth: "You've got to eat the right foods, I guess, and take the right drugs." Kantner’s connection with Science Fiction goes back to his earliest days as a performing artist, with – possibly – his best known entry into this genre being the album Blows Against the Empire in 1971. The Jefferson Starship website states that in many ways, this new project The Windowpane Collective “….harkens back to the heady collaborations embodied in recordings such as "Blows" and it's follow-ups "Sunfighter" and "Baron Von Tollbooth and The Chrome Nun" and David Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name” - (wherein members of The Airplane, Grateful Dead, CSN and Quicksilver Messenger Service operated as a musical collective) ... A-N-D ... delves into the cresting electronica & experimental music phenomenon. […] Every month or two, the COLLECTIVE will produce a CD's worth of audio content ... Music, spoken word and sound design ... mixed & moshed as a contiguous work of sonic art. Classic songs re-imagined, cover material, prose, poetry and sound effects are the Artists' "palette" and each volume Each ... a "sonic motion picture." Volume 1: "A Martian Christmas" is a daring sci-fi/ folk/ holiday electronica masterwork” Elsewhere Kantner describes his new project as “a recording workshop merging the Artists’ diverse musical, literary & science fiction interests with cutting edge electronica paradigms.'
At an age where most men have adjusted to a lifestyle of pipe and slippers, and taking the dog for a walk at Closing Time, Paul Kantner is still experimenting, still tracekilling, and still breaking new ground. We take our hats off to him. JON DOWNES
