11/30/2023 0 Comments George winston cancer![]() 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. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.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. “It gave me a good break to rest the hands,” he says with a laugh. “Every experience I have, every change of season, affects the music,” says Winston, whose albums include “Autumn” and “December.” MDS changed him, he says, in some ways, for the better. He wrote 58 songs there, 15 of which made it onto the new CD, all proceeds of which go to City of Hope. There was a baby grand in City of Hope’s auditorium, and he was at the keyboard anywhere from one to 10 hours a day, depending on his energy level. Yet four months after his transplant, he felt strong enough to play again. Azra Raza, director of the MDS Center at Columbia University Medical Center, calls Winston “very fortunate.” She says many people in their 60s don’t make it through the high-risk procedure, and that everyone who does fights infections afterwards. “I gave her 17 CDs and said, ‘Thanks for helping me make the next 15!’ ”ĭr. The hospital flew her in so Winston could meet her. “Her name is Antonia,” he tells The Post, of the then-21-year-old woman from Germany. It took only a week for specialists there to find him a donor for the bone-marrow transplant that saved his life. After being rushed to the emergency room, he was transferred to City of Hope hospital, outside LA. 13, 2012, as he lay on the dressing-room floor. “There’s a time for alternatives and there’s a time when you say, ‘No, it’s too far gone,’” says the composer, whose CD “ Spring Carousel,” out this month, consists of songs he wrote during his treatment. He thought he’d wait a few more months before letting his doctors have at him. But the American folk music composer also believed in alternative remedies: When his platelets plummeted, he tried staving off fatigue with oxtail soup. Winston had weathered both skin cancer and thyroid cancer, thanks to conventional medicine. ![]() Most vulnerable are people over 60 who have been treated with radiation or chemotherapy for other cancers, leaving them with weakened immune systems. MDS claimed the lives of Carl Sagan, Susan Sontag and many others “GMA” host Robin Roberts was public about her own battle with the disease. Three months earlier, Winston, now 68, had been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a form of cancer in which blood cells in the bone marrow fail to mature into the red or white cells needed to carry oxygen and fight infection. The Grammy-winning pianist made it through his sold-out Sandpoint, Idaho, concert, but barely, collapsing in his dressing room after leaving the stage. “If I can get through this show, I can get through anything,” George Winston told himself one night in September, 2012.
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