With the memory of her gifted husband Gary Windo as muse, Pamela Windo takes us back to the years of music she shared with him in the Sixties and Seventies, reliving the successes and fiascos, the trials of being an artist and mother, the exhilaration of the Hippie and Women's Lib movements, and the challenges of an open marriage. HIM THROUGH ME is the story of a young couple's journey through the revolutionary music world of the Sixties and Seventies. In the fall of 1969, just two months after the Hippies hijacked Woodstock, a young man leaves America and returns home to Brighton, where he knocks at the door of a girl he'd known in school. Gary has paid his dues as a saxophone player in New York City's jazz clubs and sets his sights on rousing the British music scene. Pam has traveled in Europe and North Africa, has two young sons, and has just left her home and marriage in suburbia. Gary lives life in a major key and as his own career soars, he encourages Pam to play piano, and brings her to perform and record alongside him, in the company of Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt, and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. She also played in groups with musicians from The Brotherhood of Breath and The Carla Bley Band. The book boldly evokes the energy and innocence of that ground-breaking and freedom-loving era of "making love not war," in which music played the major role.
About the Author: Pamela Windo was born in Brighton, England. She left school at sixteen to travel, first to Paris and Berlin, then on to Tunisia, where she worked at the U.S. Embassy and as radio operator on the construction of a dam. Back in England, after a first marriage and divorce, and with two young sons, she met and married childhood friend Gary Windo, a gifted saxophone player who'd just come back from New York, and who encouraged her to play piano. Soon, she found herself alongside musicians like Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt, Brotherhood of Breath's Louis Moholo, and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, with whom she recorded and played her first gig. When the couple immigrated to Woodstock, New York, Windo joined the Gary Windo Quartet with bass player Steve Swallow. She went on to form a band of her own, Pam Windo & the Shades, and after a showcase at the Whisky-a-Go-Go in L.A., was signed by Albert Grossman. In 1987, Windo bowed out of the music scene and began to write, her first article being published in The Village Voice. With a novel in mind, she went to live in Morocco where she traveled and wrote for the next seven years. She worked as English tutor, was a member of the Moroccan-American Circle under Ambassador Marc Ginsberg, and worked as location assistant for Martin Scorsese's movie, Kundun, shot in Ouarzazate. On returning to the United States, Windo wrote several books and magazine articles about her travels in Morocco, as well as giving presentations at New York University, The American Museum of Natural History, and the Residence of the Moroccan Ambassador to the U.N. In 2004, twelve years after Gary Windo's untimely death, a retrospective CD titled Anglo-American--including compositions by Pam-was chosen by the BBC as Jazz Album of the Week. A series of three retrospective albums of her husband's music was released in 2014. Pamela now lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.