Pamela Windo

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...See more

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. See less