George Winston talks about the healing power of music before concert

“There’s one song on my last album, ‘Pixie No. 13,’ that took me a year to be able to play,” Winston said. “I had thought it up, but to play it as I heard it took me about year. It was just that it took some different techniques with the right and left hands that I’d never done before. There were times when I wondered if I would ever be able to play it.”

But Winston managed to conquer his own composition, which is one of the 15 tracks on his 2017 album, “Spring Carousel.”

While the album could be seen as the final piece in the string of “seasonal” albums of solo piano music Winston has released over the course of 40 years, including the best-selling “Autumn” and “December,” the true impetus for the record was because of a health crisis.

In 2012, Winston was in the middle of a concert in Idaho when he began having trouble. He made it through the performance, but immediately afterward had to be taken to an emergency room. Winston was suffering from myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of cancer in which blood cells do not properly mature.

Winston was later transferred to City of Hope, a cancer treatment facility in California, where he underwent a bone marrow transplant.

“Not only does it provide great treatment,” said Winston, “but it has this kind of village atmosphere. While I was there, I was given access to the piano in the hospital’s auditorium. I started out practicing to get myself ready for upcoming concerts, but soon I started coming up with these songs.”

In all, Winston recorded close to 60 individual songs, from which he selected the 15 on “Spring Carousel.”