Pamela Windo:

Pamela Windo was born in Brighton. She left the sixth form at 16 to travel, first to Paris and Berlin, then on to North Africa where she lived and traveled with a young Tunisian and his family, and also worked as radio operator on a dam-building site. Back in England, after a first marriage and divorce, and with two young boys in tow, she married childhood friend Gary Windo, a gifted saxophone player, and found herself alongside musicians like Nick Mason, with whom she recorded and played her first gig on keyboards, and with Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine.

When she and Gary immigrated to Woodstock in upstate New York, she started a band of her own, “Pam Windo & The Shades,” and joined “The Gary Windo Quartet” with bass player Steve Swallow. When the music business got too heavy, she began to write and escaped to Morocco where she lived and traveled for seven years, turning her hand to English tutor and hotel receptionist, and finally to location assistant for Martin Scorsese’s movie “Kundun,” shot in Ouarzazate. She is now a grandmother and lives and writes quietly in Jersey City.

In May, a retrospective CD of Gary’s and her music was released, and was chosen by the BBC as Album of the Week.