Winter Moons Orchestra Winter Moons

On Friday, August 5, 2022, Chickasaw composer and U.S. Cultural Ambassador Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate will release a new album, Winter Moons, on Azica Records. Winter Moons is a ballet in four movements based upon American Indian legends from the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountains, performed with a live storyteller to guide the audience. The title of the ballet is derived from the ancient idea that American Indian stories - some serious historical narratives, and others lighthearted bedtime stories for children, but all usually carrying a moral - are best told during the full moons of the wintertime. Winter Moons was Tate's very first composition, commissioned by and dedicated to his mother, choreographer Dr. Patricia Tate. Spirit Chief Names the Animal People was part of the original version of Winter Moons and is now performed as a separate work with narrator.

"Arctic Dreams" (2020) is both warmly seductive and intense—a work whose seven sections bloom with passion as they map a musical journey through landscapes real and imagined. George Grella wrote in the New York Classical Review, “Adams’s manner is that of Thoreau—to be in a place, incorporate it into his memory and values, and recreate that through music. It misses the point to say he is inspired by nature—Adams is changed by nature and his music is a catalogue of the places that changed him.” Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, has called Adams “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.”