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By George! That's not world music

By Ron Brownlow
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, May 25, 2007, Page 13

Like many members of his generation, the seminal musical experience of George Winston's adolescence was listening to The Doors' debut album. One Friday night in January of 1967, he took his Christmas money and bought the record. The band wasn't famous yet, but Winston liked instrumentals and, as he described himself, was the kind of music fan who "freaked out on organ music like young girls freaked out on the Beatles."

Winston took the record home to his room and played it. "It obliterated everything I had ever listened to," he recalled in a phone interview last month. This led to a series of events that saw him take up playing the organ, form a band and — three decades later — publish an album of The Doors songs he had set to the piano.

"It pushed me to play," he said. "I feel like I'm the same person, but now I want to play the songs whereas before I just wanted to buy the songs."

But forming a band inspired by The Doors was just the beginning for Winston — who plays the National Taiwan University Sports Center tomorrow and Sunday. By the time Jim Morrison died, Winston already felt that rock had become too commercialized.

So he went all the way back to the 1920s in search of a purer sound, and found it in the pianists of New Orleans — people like Henry Butler, James Booker, Professor Longhair, Dr John, Allen Toussaint, and Jon Cleary. When Winston heard Fats Waller in 1971, he knew that the piano, not the organ, was the instrument for him. When he discovered Longhair in 1979, it was an epiphany and he has spent the rest of his life learning how to express himself in the master's musical language.

"Rock was just the tip of the iceberg for me," Winston said. He calls the music he developed "rural folk" or "melodic folk" piano style. In recent years he has also been playing the slack key guitar of Hawaii, and he often plays a harmonica solo in concert.

Winston has been called one of the progenitors of what is now known as New Age music — an appellation he deeply resents. "New Age is meditation stuff," he said.

"Much of my work on the piano is studying the musical languages of the great New Orleans R&B pianists," Winston says in a bio on his Web site. "Especially Professor Longhair, the founder of the New Orleans R&B piano scene in the late 1940s who inspired so many; James Booker, whose language most influences the way I think of playing; and Henry Butler, who is the pianist I have studied the most since 1985. I'm also indebted to New Orleans pianists Dr John, Jon Cleary, and the eminent composer-pianist Allen Toussaint."

George Winston will be performing in Taipei on Saturday (7:30pm) and Sunday (4:30pm) at the National Taiwan University Sports Center, 1 Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei (台北市羅斯福路四段1號).

The concert will be acoustic. Tickets are being sold through ERA ticketing outlets.
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