George Winston’s imitators are long gone, but he still makes meaningful music

George Winston

It was just over 35 years ago that George Winston cemented his own musical voice, style and, to an extent, genre with an album titled “December.” The record was the Montana native’s fourth solo piano offering, a holiday themed collection of traditional carols, folk songs, classical pieces and original compositions.

But the resulting music wasn’t folk or classical. It wasn’t jazz, either. Winston’s playing possessed elements from all those camps along with sense of pop lyricism. But it also reflected a level of melancholy, a cinematic expansiveness despite the unaccompanied piano setting.

The music quickly spawned imitators along with a genre inexplicably dubbed New Age. But what those factions and that category spawned was essentially executive elevator music, a serviceable background sound built on forced sentiment. What Winston created was simpler, deeper and considerably more enduring music.

More than three-and-a-half decades and some 10 albums after “December,” Winston has survived the imitators, who have long since evaporated into obscurity, as well as the New Age tag, which despite occasional usage today, reads like a signpost from the 1980s.

Curiously, for a piano sound so accessible, distinctive and consistent, Winston has openly acknowledged numerous and seeming conflicting influences. They include Hawaiian slack key guitar music (which Winston helped introduce to audiences outside of the islands with recordings by native masters of the form on his Dancing Cat label), the jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi (whose music Winston devoted two entire albums to), the great New Orleans stride pianist Henry Butler and even The Doors (as heard on the 2002 album “Night Divides the Day”).

But Winston has also been an artist who has long put his music and his money where his heart is.

He quickly assembled an 11 song benefit record of solo piano, guitar and harmonica pieces titled “Remembrance” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Similarly, he released “Gulf Coast Blues and Impressions” a collection of piano works by himself and several New Orleans piano giants (Butler, James Booker and Dr. John) in 2006 to help raise relief funds for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Winston’s newest recording is also his newest benefit project. This one, though, is considerably more personal in design.

Already a survivor of thyroid and skin cancer, the pianist was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome while on tour in late 2012. The condition required a bone marrow transplant. While convalescing at City of Hope, a cancer research and treatment center in Southern California, Winston played the piano in the facility’s auditorium. That led to a series of “swirling” tunes inspired metaphorically by merry-go-rounds and music boxes and, more literally, by the circular compositional styles of Steve Reich and Howard Blake.

The results surfaced in 2017 as “Spring Carousel,” a suite of 15 new Winston solo piano pieces with a clarity, richness and melodic (and melancholic) spirit that make them relate readily to the music of “December” and other albums he cut for the Windham Hill label for more than 25 years.

Sometimes the music possesses an air of ragtime (as on “Fess’ Carousels”). In other instances, the playing reveals an animated, child-like lyricism (“Requited Love”). There are even a few points where Winston’s music adopts an atypically clipped, percussive tone (“Muted Dream” and “Dream 2”). But throughout, the lyrical richness that has always been an earmark of Winston’s playing abounds.

All artistic royalties from “Spring Carousel” have gone to City of Hope, which Winston generously thanked in the liner notes for their treatment and care but also “access to their piano.”

Winston will perform solo piano music from throughout his career tonight at the Grand Theatre in Frankfort.

This story was originally published April 11, 2018 at 12:52 PM with the headline "George Winston’s imitators are long gone, but he still makes meaningful music."