A musician who describes himself as a creature of the night, pianist George Winston charts a nocturnal journey with Night. His sensitive keyboard touch and beautiful tone do invoke the reverie many associate with the nighttime. There’s a prayerful quality, too, in this 16th solo piano album from the 72-year-old pianist who’s survived three bouts with cancer.

Winston opens with “Beverly,” a warm and elegantly played original composition that’s part folksong, part hymn. Maintaining a reverential atmosphere, Winston, a devotee of New Orleans pianists Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey “Piano” Smith and Allen Toussaint, continues with an almost sacred interpretation of Toussaint’s “Freedom for the Stallion.”

For his rendition of the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah,” Winston makes the usual choice of deemphasizing the famous melody that’s been recorded and performed by so many artists. In contrast, after almost hiding the “Hallelujah” melody beneath elaborate keyboard accompaniment, Winston obviously accentuates the melody in a fragmentary reading of Rod Taylor’s “Making a Way.”
The album’s most intimate and tender selection may be Winston’s rendition of Laura Nyro’s “He’s a Runner.” His compositions “Kai Forest” and the Hawaiian slack-key guitar-inspired “Wahine Hololio” see him returning to the nature themes he’s often pursued. Both compositions pair muted piano strings with ringing bell-like notes. Another Hawaiian selection, the gently wrenching “Pua Sadinia ‘Not to Be Forgotten’,” is, hands-down, the album’s most elegiac selection.

Acquired taste though the idiosyncratic Winston may be, Night proves once more that he is a master of keyboard shadow and light.