Winston also shares the interest of minimalist composers - and, by extension, ambient musicians such as Brian Eno - in crossing the boundaries of genre to grab rhythmic ideas from jazz, from pop, and from international musical traditions. Winston emphasizes his roots in pop and jazz, stating forthrightly that "I have never played any European classical music, and I don't have any classical influence." Yet, while he's not a classical musician, it's nonetheless clear that Winston is not walled off from contemporary classical music.Īt the Fitzgerald, Winston acknowledged the influence of towering minimalist composer Steve Reich in a Cage-ian flourish, Winston sometimes reaches inside the piano to mute the strings as he plays. New age music was, and remains, a laughingstock for the kind of classical music fans who prize intellectual rigor and formal innovation, but new age music is a branch on a family tree that can be traced back through Philip Glass and Terry Riley to John Cage, Erik Satie, and beyond. By the 80s, "new age" music had become both a phenomenon and a joke though the spare acoustic aesthetic of Windham Hill stood apart from the cheesy swooping synths of, say, Yanni, the Windham Hill artists shared the emerging genre's interest in ambient, minimalist instrumental music that foregrounded texture and mood. His earliest solo piano recordings, released in 1972 as Ballads and Blues, came squarely from those pop, jazz, and blues traditions.īy the end of the decade, Winston had discovered the "folk" sound that made him a contemporary-instrumental superstar. His inspiration to switch to piano came from jazz recordings by "Fats" Waller and other legends of stride piano. Before he played piano, he played organ - inspired, a program note explains, by the likes of the Doors and Booker T. Winston came to the keyboard through popular music: born in 1949, he grew up with rock 'n' roll. Whether the kind of music heard on Winston's albums Autumn (1980), Winter Into Spring (1982), December (1982), and Summer (1991) is "folk," "new age," or something else, Winston and most of his listeners agree that it's certainly not "classical." Most of the selections on those albums are original compositions, played on an instrument that's central to the classical repertoire - but Winston's rarely heard on classical stations, and is shelved in classical bins only in the kind of stores where books are filed under a sign reading "authors." (The label is now owned by Sony, which continues to distribute some of the label's past releases but no longer issues new Windham Hill recordings.) Winston was among the label's classic roster of artists who played music that became known (and mocked) as "new age" music - though that was never an appellation that Winston embraced. Founded in 1976 by guitarist and composer William Ackerman, Windham Hill became a fad among 80s yuppies who gravitated to the label's unique sound and iconic modern packaging. I first became aware of Winston the way most people did: through his recordings for the Windham Hill label. On his website, Winston says that he prefers the "rural folk piano" label because his music "is melodic and not complicated in its approach, like folk guitar picking and folk songs, and has a rural sensibility." "On the page, the music doesn't look difficult to play," explained a young pianist whose fingers could be seen playing silently along on her lap as Winston performed, "but no one can play it like he does." This fan sitting in front of me described Winston as a true original with an inimitable style that Winston has devised to create his impressionistic music that's often inspired by nature. "It's folk piano - that's the only way I can describe it," said a superfan who traveled all the way from Atlanta to hear Winston play at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. George Winston describes his best-known music as "rural folk piano." That always struck me as odd, since a Steinway grand is not a rural folk instrument when pianos do crop up in rural folk settings, it's fairly rare that they're used to play spacious and urbane original compositions influenced by minimalism and jazz.
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