George Winston

Not many solo pianists become pop-culture icons, but George Winston did it by virtually inventing his own genre from a blend of classical, jazz, folk, blues, and rock influences. Legions of others leapt on board with their own variation and dubbed it New Age, but Winston’s sound defies labeling. He’s best known for impressionistic ivory sketches of the natural world, like the luminous lines of “Moon,” but his restless muse is bound to take him everywhere from the Baroque-era reboot “Variations on the Kanon by Pachelbel” to a slightly skewed twist on jazzman Vince Guaraldi’s famed Peanuts theme “Linus & Lucy.”

Winston bangs out some blues and opens up some Doors, in Next Steps.

George Winston’s work wanders as wide as the spectrum of his inspirations. His very first album, Ballads and Blues 1972, lived up to its title, with the piano man pounding out his own brand of barrelhouse boogie on “Highway Hymn Blues.” But Winston grew up on rock ’n’ roll, too, and he poured his passion into a whole album of Doors covers, including a deliciously dreamy take on the band’s moody masterpiece “The Crystal Ship.” Meanwhile, “Love Song to a Ballerina” lends a clue to another side of Winston, with a milky minimalism that comes off like Erik Satie composing music-box tunes.

In Deep Cuts, George Winston makes movies for your ears.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then one of George Winston’s piano portraits is probably equal to an entire novel, or more likely a film, since his sound is so cinematic. For instance, the Aaron Copland-gets-dust-on-his-boots feel of “Billy In the Low Land” evokes the greatest Western epic you’ve never seen. “The Breaks” was recorded for a post-Katrina New Orleans benefit, and its blend of Big Easy R&B bounce and unbridled urgency captures the Crescent City’s moment of turmoil like little else could. And when Winston dips into the Doors catalog once more for “Spanish Caravan,” it’s impossible to avoid images of thundering horses racing beneath a Mediterranean moon — a vivid scene in search of a movie if ever there was one.

George Winston crafted a new brand of musical Americana by bringing the Great Plains vistas he absorbed in his Montana boyhood to life on the ivories, mixing in touches of everything from ragtime to rock along the way, and kicking off a quiet revolution in modern music. He approaches the piano like an impressionistic painter, unveiling images that evoke entire worlds within a few well-placed notes, and he might take any number of routes to create those canvases, be it dampening the piano strings for the percussive tones on “Dubuque” or even switching to guitar on “Daughters and Sons.” Whichever road he chooses, we’ve captured the most crucial moments in this true American original’s homespun-but-heavy-duty history, and you can have them all at your fingertips right here.