Will Ackerman - Biography
By J Poet
Although he hates the term New Age Music, Will Ackerman helped create the genre and paved the way for its success. He never considered himself a great guitar player, but his melodic sense, spare and tasteful playing, inventive alternate tunings, and clear, ringing tone on the steel-stringed guitar struck a deep chord in listeners. He founded Windham Hill Records as a small independent label and watched it grow to a 24 million dollar business. In 1996 he sold Windham Hill to RCA/BMG and retired to Brattleboro, Vermont, close to the actual Windham Hill. In 2004, he won a Best New Age Album Grammy for Returning (2004 Windham Hill), a new recording of his favorite compositions.
Ackerman never intended to be a musician. Although he played guitar since he was a boy, he was shy about performing and almost had to be forced into the studio to make his first album. Ackerman was born in Germany, but was adopted by Stanford University professor Robert W. Ackerman and his wife Mary. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and dropped out of Stanford University to become a carpenter. He was always interested in music and his construction company, Windham Hill Builders (named after a town in Vermont where he used to spend his summers as a boy), specialized in building studios for independent record labels. On the side, Ackerman played guitar, constantly practicing and inventing new open tunings. He found stairwells in the buildings at Stanford that gave his playing a natural reverberation, and the people who heard him began asking him if he’d ever made an album. This led to a commission composing music for a production of Romeo and Juliet at Stanford.
In 1975, a group of his friends and fans collected $300 for the recording of his first album. Ackerman chose Mantra Studios and made In Search of the Turtle's Navel (1976 Windham Hill) in two afternoon-long sessions. The ten compositions are beautifully unfolding mini-suites that struck an immediate chord in listeners. After paying back his investors with copies of the album, he placed the remaining 440 copies in a local bookstore run by his future wife, Anne Robinson. The albums sold out immediately. Solo jazzy guitar albums weren’t a high priority for the music business at the time, but In Search of the Turtle's Navel slowly and steadily continued to sell.
Ackerman and Robinson kept their day jobs and worked nights and weekends distributing albums to other small stores. They designed the cover art and glued the album covers together themselves, while the record picked up airplay and a strong word of moth buzz. His next two albums, It Takes a Year (1977 Windham Hill) – a blend of folk, jazz, bluegrass, and classical impulses – and Childhood and Memory (1979 Windham Hill) did well enough to land him a distribution deal. Ackerman and Robinson became full-time label owners. In 1980, Ackerman signed pianist George Winston and his first album of solo piano music, Autumn (1980 Windham Hill), went platinum and landed on Billboard’s jazz chart. Windham Hill became an unexpected success, grossing millions of dollars a year.
Passage (1981 Windham Hill), a collaboration with Winston and fiddler Darol Anger, and Past Light (1983 Windham Hill), which features the Kronos Quartet, continued Ackerman’s winning streak. In 1984, A&M picked up Windham Hill’s distribution and let Ackerman retain complete artistic control of the label and his music. By 1985, Windham Hill was grossing over 20 million dollars a year.
Conferring with the Moon: Pieces for Guitar (1986 Windham Hill) and Imaginary Roads (1990 Windham Hill) include a small chamber ensemble that expands the depth and texture of the music without taking away from Ackerman’s crystalline guitar playing and deeply emotional compositions. In 1992, he sold half of Windham Hill to RCA and left the business side of the music business. He moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, built the state of the art Imaginary Road studio, and started producing other artists. He also continued recording and composing, and produced The Opening of Doors (1992 Windham Hill), an expansive work featuring Paul McCandless on English horn and oboe, Michael Manring on fretless bass, Buckethead on electric guitar, Philip Aaberg on piano, Tim Story on keyboards, and Michael Spiro on percussion. He the produced 1998’s Sound of Wind Driven Rain (1998 Windham Hill) with McCandless, Manring, Aaberg, and African vocalist Samite, and Hearing Voices (2001 Windham Hill), a collaboration with vocalists that produces hymn-like meditations on the human voice, with Samite, Happy Rhodes, Curtis King, Nick Berry, and Heather Rankin singing in a variety of languages and using vocables to connect with the deepest part of the human spirit. Hearing Voices also includes Ackerman’s first, and only, electric guitar work.
In 1996 he sold the rest of Windham Hill to RCA and “retired” although he continues to make albums and produce other artists. For Returning (2004 Windham Hill), Ackerman rerecorded and reinvented 11 of his compositions dating back to 1975’s “Bricklayer's Beautiful Daughter.” It was his first solo album in almost 20 years and won Best New Age Album at the Grammys. Meditations (2008 Windham Hill/Lifescapes) continues Ackerman’s investigation of his past work with seven new pieces and seven expansive orchestral arrangements of old favorites, and in 2010 he released New England Roads.
