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Don't pigeonhole George Winston
First, they called it jazz, and then it was New Age, and then meditational. But this pianist's music doesn't fall neatly into categories.
By PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 11, 2001
George Winston released a trio of pastoral, introspective piano albums -- Autumn, Winter Into Spring and December -- in the early '80s, and the surprisingly popular discs provided the ultimate background music for dinner parties all over America.
That success launched the Windham Hill label and brightened commercial prospects for a West Coast brand of contemplative noodling later dubbed New Age. Supporters of the contemporary jazz and smooth jazz radio formats probably have Winston to thank for demonstrating the appeal of instrumental music to a new generation of listeners.
And then the Montana-bred Michigan native all but vanished from the national scene, surfacing in the next decade to score the The Velveteen Rabbit, a children's album for which Meryl Streep read the classic story.
That extended absence came after an earlier disappearing act: Winston retired from music for about seven years after the release of his 1972 debut, Ballads and Blues.
Why the post-December silence?
"I kind of lost interest in playing for a while," Winston, 51, said recently by telephone from a studio in San Francisco, where he was producing another in a series of recordings by Hawaiian slack key guitarists for his own Dancing Cat label.
The serious-minded but easygoing musician, now touring behind 1999's Plains with solo shows featuring his work on piano, guitar and harmonica, remains surprised by the success of 1980's Autumn and its successors.
"I was just doing this because it was how I felt about the seasons," he said. "I think about what's inside me, what's on fire, what wants to be said or has to be said."
Plains, a reflection on eastern Montana, is informed by the same sensibility that defined his seasonal-themed albums. Winston's playing, on piano keys that resonate long after being struck, is studied and thoughtful. The program juxtaposes original compositions with his arrangements of the American fiddle tune Dubuque, Italian composer Massimo Gatti's Frangenti, a pair of Hawaiian pieces, the standard Teach Me Tonight, Sarah McLachlan's Angel and The Dance, a Garth Brooks hit.
The album "was directly inspired by having lived there, and by the Great Plains in general," said Winston, who now lives in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Winston already is deep into planning his next CD. Dance, to be released next year, will center on music written by and/or in the tradition of Henry Butler, the late Professor Longhair, James Booker and other New Orleans R&B pianists.
"I want it. I've got to have it," Winston said of his interest in the style, to which he gravitated in the late '70s after exploring the stride piano of Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson.
Dance may further confuse those who try to categorize Winston's music.
"New Age was the wrong title," he said. "It was called jazz before that, and I said,'No, no, that's not jazz.'The other (label) was meditational. People have got to call things something, I guess. The melodies are kind of simple, and they're kind of diatonic in the scale. I'm just playing tunes. You could call it 'rural folk.' "
PREVIEW
George Winston, 8 p.m. Monday, Mahaffey Theater. Tickets are $20, $32 and $35.
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