Died today.
NY Times: George Winston, Pianist With a Popular Soothing Sound, Dies at 74, subtitled “He won a Grammy in the new age category, and his top-selling records helped define the genre. But his interests also included Hawaiian guitar and the Doors.”
I have/had a couple of his albums, which I liked well enough, though his music tended to be almost bland, lounge music. In the 1970s and ’80s I gravitated to other somewhat more complex composers, from Vangelis to Philip Glass.
He personified the kind of music played in the ’70s and ’80s on one LA’s independent radio stations, KPFK (which also ran the long-running science fiction talk show Hour 25) I think, had a late night program called Music from the Hearts of Space — now Hearts of Space — “Welcome to the world’s most lovingly curated collection of Ambient, Space, and Contemplative music from around the world and across the centuries — a resource for calm, concentration and deep listening since 1983.”
It was another world that people had discovered in the ’70s and ’80s, and it’s mostly been absorbed into popular culture by now.
