And I have something to talk about besides the fact I’m not New Age.” I mean, why? I feel like talking to you, so I am, but it wouldn’t feel good otherwise. “It was real uncomfortable, all this notoriety, so I didn’t talk to anybody. Come on! I’m not any big thing I’ve been doing this (music) since 1971. “If you do interviews just to sell tickets, you burn out. “Yeah, I stayed low-key,” said the Michigan-born pianist. Winston, whose early influences ranged from the Ventures to Herb Alpert, responded by largely shunning the media. But he also became the subject of considerable controversy.Ĭritics dismissed his work as neo-mood music or worse, while jazz pianist Keith Jarrett complained that Winston had grossly simplified and diluted Jarrett’s more intricate and harmonically dense solo piano style. Regarded as visionary by some and vapid by others, New Age began as a grass-roots movement that was spearheaded by Windham Hill, the small, independent record label that released Winston’s first album, “Autumn,” in 1980.Īlmost single-handedly, the bearded pianist helped transform what had been an underground phenomenon into a mainstream success. Winston is known, but may not be remembered by future generations, as the most commercially popular New Age performer of the 1980s.Ī catch-all phrase, New Age was coined to describe predominantly acoustic instrumental music characterized by spare, overtly melodic songs that favor simplicity over complexity and gentleness over emotional fervor. I had the privilege of playing for you all, now let’s move on.” “It takes about three generations to forget about everything, so I have no doubt I’ll be forgotten, and that’s good. Benny Goodman, who remembers him? Who even plays clarinet? “I have (it) in my will that there’s to be no funeral, only cremation. “I don’t want to be remembered,” said the Grammy Award-winning New Age pianist, who performs Saturday night at downtown’s Spreckels Theatre. Many musicians dream of achieving immortality. July 11, 1996, The San Diego Union-Tribune Here is his complete 1996 interview: Will we remember him? Forget it, says pianist “I like playing music a lot, and I like telling people about the people I came from probably even more,” Winston explained.
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He made his San Diego debut at the living-room-sized Old Time Cafe in Leucadia and continued to have them produce his San Diego concerts - even after he began performing in such major area venues as the San Diego Civic Theatre and the Speckels Theatre.Īttendees at his concerts here were given free brochures that endorsed nearly two-dozen of his favorite artists, including albums jazz piano greats Teddy Wilson and Dollar Brand, guitarists Ralph Towner and Bola Sete, singer-songwriter Randy Newman, New Orleans music icon Professor Longhair, minimalist composer Steve Reich, and others. It provided a welcome aural balm for his loyal listeners.
Winston’s music was pleasant if innocuous, soothing but lacking in nuance, emotional intensity, thematic variation and dynamic tension and release. But, as little soul as it has, that’s the best thing to call it.” People would ask: ‘Is he like Randy Travis? ‘Contemporary instrumental’ is nebulous.
“I call what I do ‘rural folk.’ I could call it country, but that would be more confusing. It was a category Winston was quick to distance himself from, albeit without much success. His first album, 1972’s “Ballads and Blues,” made no impact.īut his next album, 1980’s pastoral “Autumn,” put him on the map, along with Windham Hill, the nascent Palo Alto record company that soon became one of the most successful independent labels in the nation.īoth he and Windham Hill became synonymous with New Age. He took piano lessons as a kid, then switched to organ after hearing the debut album by the Doors, whose lead singer, Jim Morrison, had grown up partly in San Diego.īy the 1970s, Winston had turned to solo piano. 11, 1949, in Hart, Mich., and grew up in grew up in Mississippi, Florida and Montana.
If slack-key albums are available for people, then I’ve done my job.” “If people remember me for anything,” Winston said, “I hope it’s for helping to make slack-key as visible as other guitar traditions. More specifically, the music he championed on his Dancing Cat record label by such noted Hawaiian slack-key guitarists as Cyril Pahinui and Ray Kane.
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