George Winston, pianist who tried to echo nature, dies at 74
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George Winston, a pianist and composer whose unadorned melodies sought to evoke seasonal rhythms of nature and became a signature style of New Age music in the 1980s with popular albums such as “Autumn” and “December,” died June 4 in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight His death was confirmed by his publicist, Jesse Cutler. Mr. Winston had various forms of cancer and underwent a bone-marrow transplant a decade ago for a blood-related disorder. He lived in the San Francisco area and was staying in Williamsport near his tour manager.
Mr. Winston released more than 15 albums — selling more than 15 million copies — over a five-decade career of mainly instrumental compositions he called “folk piano,” containing elements of jazz and blues that were pared down into looping melodies and tumbling arpeggios. His inspiration remained rooted in the natural world, trying to convey the shifting seasons or moments such as a moonlit night or waves on a beach.
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His music also became part of a musical current that gained force in 1980s. The New Age sound — an ethereal and mood-heavy genre that bought up associations with mediation and spirituality — had emerged from the West Coast and moved into wider audiences through musicians such as Greek composer Yanni and Irish singer-songwriter Enya. Mr. Winston was quickly embraced by the New Age music scene.
Music reviewers often found Mr. Winston — and New Age music in general — a choice target, however. “The stuff is strictly nonstick, audio Teflon,” wrote New York Times music critic Jon Pareles in a 1987 essay on New Age music. After the release of Mr. Winston’s 1999 album “Plains,” Mike Joyce writing in The Washington Post described Mr. Winston as a specialist in “sleepy tempos and for fashioning arrangements that iron out nearly all harmonic wrinkles.”
Mr. Winston acknowledged that his uncomplicated approach left him open to criticism. “One person’s punk rock is another person’s singing ‘Om’ or playing harp,” he told the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1982. “It’s all valid — everybody’s got their own path. I wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to me all day.”
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He scoffed, too, at notions that his work was embedded with a spiritual dimension. “I just play the songs the best I can, inspired by the seasons and the topographies and regions … and try to improve as a player over time,” he wrote on his website.
The evolution of what Mr. Winston called his “rural sensibility” began with music far removed from prairies and woodlands. He had abandoned piano lessons as a teenager and then came across the pulsating organ and keyboard style of the Doors’ Ray Manzarek in 1967. “I had to start playing organ,” Mr. Winston said.
He studied recordings of jazz organists such as Jimmy Smith. He went back to piano to dive into the stride and boogie-woogie verve of masters including Fats Waller and Professor Longhair (Roy Byrd). In stride playing, the left hand moves between bass and chords while the right hand plays the improvisation.
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“My approach is entirely North American, rather than European,” Mr. Winston said, “and I treat the piano as an Afro-American tuned drum.”
His debut album in 1973, “Piano Solos” (rereleased in 1981 as “Ballads and Blues”), was a collection of folk-inspired pieces with guitarist John Fahey. In 1980, Mr. Winston signed with Windham Hill Records, one of the first labels to build a wide-ranging roster of New Age artists. By this time, he had developed his style of sparse melodies played in the stride piano tradition.
His album “Autumn” (1980) — with tracks including “Sea,” “Woods” and “Moon” — became a surprise hit and established Windham Hill as a pillar of New Age music. Mr. Winston followed with seasonal-themed companion collections, “Winter into Spring” and “December,” both released in 1982.
He continued with “Summer” (1991) and 1994’s “Forest,” which won a Grammy Award for the best New Age recording.
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His last album, “Night,” was released in 2022 and includes interpretations of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and other pieces by songwriter and singer Laura Nyro and pianist Allen Toussaint. The album also showcased his deep interest in Hawaii’s slack-key guitar, a musical tradition he promoted on his Dancing Cat Records label.
“The night has many colors, they’re just more subtle,” he said in reference to the album’s title. “And I am nocturnal.”
‘Seasons were entertainment’
George Otis Winston III was born in Hart, Mich., on Feb. 11, 1949, and was raised in Mississippi, Florida and Montana. His father was a geologist, and his mother was an executive secretary.
He said his affinity for nature began as a boy in eastern Montana, where the family home had no television reception and could get one radio station. “The seasons were entertainment,” he said, recalling how he jumped into piles of leaves in the fall and made snow angles in the winter drifts. In 2004 he released the album “Montana — A Love Story.”
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He attended Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., but left before finishing his degree. In 1996 he released “Linus and Lucy: The Music of Vince Guaraldi,” a tribute to the jazz pianist behind the soundtracks to the “Peanuts” cartoon specials, and he paid homage to the Doors with “Night Divides the Day” in 2002.
At concerts, he would sometimes surprise audiences by playing the guitar or harmonica. (In 2012 he released “George Winston: Harmonica Solos.”) At New York’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1987, he invited audience members to come onstage to dance to one of Guaraldi’s pieces from 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Survivors include a sister.
Mr. Winston’s musical image was serene. But he described an after-concert bash in Warsaw as one of his best nights. He channeled his New Orleans idol, Professor Longhair.
“It was my greatest musical experience,” Mr. Winston told Downbeat magazine in 1986. “The wilder they got, the wilder I got. Every time I thought, ‘What do I do next?’ I fell back to Professor Longhair. It worked every time. I’m glad I was ready.”
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Source: The Washington Post
