George Winston’s "Autumn" has served as an emotional backdrop to the change of season. A beautiful recording for solo piano, Autumn finds Winston developing simple melodic motifs with studied left-hand underpinning, on hypnotic pieces like “Woods,”, which moves from a brisk rhythmic figure to rubato minor-key runs. Leaving pauses and breaths in all the right places, Winston suggests the play of color and light, the comfortable melancholy, and the encroaching slow-down that characterizes the fall season. Full of memorable themes and moods, Autumn is a timeless album, and serves as a good introduction for someone who has not heard George Winston.

Self-described "rural folk piano" player George Winston was among the earliest and most successful proponents of the genre of contemporary instrumental music later dubbed new age.
Signing to the Windham Hill label, between 1980 and 1982 he recorded a trilogy of albums - Autumn, December, and Winter Into Spring - of impressionistic, seasonally themed piano musings that laid much of the groundwork for the new age boom to follow.
In a sense, this second seasonal album follows an opposite direction from Autumn, its hard, isolated notes and stop-and-start style gradually giving way from the stasis of winter to the growth and movement of spring. It's a good album for beginning your day.

This seminal new age pianist has sold zillions of recordings with songs that reflect the quieter moments of the human spirit. It's clear from his phenomenal tribute to Vince Guaraldi and this irresistible tribute to the Doors that it takes the music of others to truly tap into a deeper place that gives variety, spunk, and magical energy to his playing. What makes this project so intense is the variety of moods he creates – the imaginative way he modulates from dark and haunting, lower-register chord poundings and upper-register whimsy. The most dramatic example of this contrast comes in the first few minutes of "Riders on the Storm," which begins building with ominous horror movie-type tones, then adds a swirling wind of high-toned harmony on top of the dark melody…

“Eastern Montana”, the first in a series of posthumous releases from acclaimed solo pianist George Winston, was inspired by the surroundings of his childhood growing up in Miles City and Billings during the 1950s. Winston described Montana with its beautiful topography and wonderful people as “the greatest feeling of love and inspiration I have ever had.” Winston’s legacy as one of the foremost instrumental composers of our time perseveres with his latest studio album "Eastern Montana" sure to become a Winston classic.

This collection of music for guitar, brought together by Jose Luis Bieito as the musical element of his music+image binomis, Reflections, possesses a delightful balance of sounds. These are flowing, pulsing, mostly gentle sounds that tend to soothe and calm the listener's mind. Sounds that - through a variety of compositional techniques - tend to be sustained in time; the effects of which can sometimes capture a listener’s attention, holding it inside an extended musical moment, like a spell. When heard while viewing the accompanying (provocative, sometimes disturbing) images, the sounds can serve an additional function: grounding the listener's reaction, enabling the passage of emotion; like electricity discharging through a lightening rod.

George Winston has released his 15th solo piano album, “Restless Wind”, via Dancing Cat Records/RCA Records. By virtue of his brilliance as one of the foremost instrumental composers of our time, “Restless Wind” presents a stunning journey documenting George Winston’s sociological observations in American history. Winston repurposes for the modern listener stunningly relevant works by musical greats such as Sam Cooke, The Doors, Stephen Stills, George & Ira Gershwin, Country Joe McDonald, and others. “Restless Wind” captures Winston’s inimitable melodic language where piano textures and tones set the stage for vivid renderings of classic compositions.