Philip Aaberg R.I.P. April 8, 1949-May 23, 2026

Pianist Philip Aaberg of Windham Hill Records Dead at 77

by John Diliberto 5/25/2026

PHILIP AABERG
April 8, 1949 – May 23, 2026

Pianist Philip Aaberg lived in San Francisco for the better part of three decades of his adult life. But he was born and raised in Montana. That’s the landscape that shaped his music, and that’s where he returned in the last decades of his life. Aaberg struck the final key on May 23, 2026.

Aaberg came to renown in the mid-1980s at the height of Windham Hill Records and made several albums for the label, including his critically acclaimed 1985 debut, High Plains. He continued releasing solo albums on the label until Cinema in 1992. Then he began releasing his records on his own Sweetgrass Music label. His 2001 album, Live from Montana, was nominated for a Grammy Award. If you haven’t heard his solo music, then you’ve heard him on some of the biggest pop hits of the 1970s. He played with Peter Gabriel, and he co-wrote material for Elvin Bishop’s Struttin’ My Stuff, the 1975 album that included Bishop’s biggest hit, “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.”

Born on April 8, 1949, in Havre, Montana, and raised in Chester, Aaberg began playing piano as a child and won a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied music. After college, he moved to California and spent years in the worlds of blues and rock, touring and recording with artists including Elvin Bishop, Peter Gabriel, and members of the Doobie Brothers.

Aaberg emerged as a solo artist in 1985 with High Plains, released on Windham Hill Records. His music blew off the plains of Montana where he was born. The late pianist George Winston, who was also from Montana, recorded many of Aaberg’s compositions.

“I don’t go listen to melodic pianists. I get enough of that except for Philip Aaberg,” noted Winston in a 1990s Echoes interview. “People think he’s influenced by me a little bit; it’s totally the other way around. He captures Montana so well.”

John Diliberto & Philip Aaberg 1990s, San Francisco.

Aaberg wrote his first album while living in San Francisco, but he kept Montana in plain sight.

“I recorded and composed all of it while I was in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Oakland,” he related in a 2002 Echoes interview. “And I had one of those relief maps where the mountains stick up right above the piano, and I used to sit and compose and look at the map, and a lot of the pieces came straight out of looking at the map and imagining what that part of the state was like.”

Probably the most technically gifted of all the pianists on Windham Hill Records, Philip Aaberg got his degree in music from Harvard University in 1971, studying alongside fellow students like classical composer John Adams. This quote gives you an idea of the eclectic musical ideas flowing through Aaberg’s world.

“At that time, Harvard was a particularly good place to have come to this,” he said. “Karlheinz Stockhausen was there, and the Beach Boys were going through with the Maharishi, and Terry Riley was doing trance music, and I was studying classical, and I was playing in a bluegrass band, so it’s pretty normal, I think, for me to be doing what I’m doing.”

Like many gifted and versatile players, Philip Aaberg got sidetracked into studio work, including cutting music for cartoons. But he got out of that, and his demo found its way to Windham Hill Records, who released his first album, High Plains, in 1985. Aaberg recorded several albums for the label, revealing an eclectic musical sensibility that ranged from movie soundtracks to boogie-woogie.

Aaberg was a casualty of the late-1990s purge of Windham Hill Records. He founded his own label, Sweetgrass Music, and his first album was Live from Montana, essentially a best-of Philip Aaberg collection. Another album, Field Notes, goes to a little-known aspect of Aaberg: his skill as an improviser. But Will Ackerman knew.

“‘Floyd’s Ghost’ was a matter of bringing Phil Aaberg into the studio without having even played him the track,” revealed Will Ackerman to Echoes.  “And we rolled tape without his having ever heard the take. It had all the energy of improvisation, and yet it was a very cohesive piece.”

John Diliberto & Philip Aaberg 2003, Indre Studios Philadelphia.

Among his many honors were a Grammy nomination for Live from Montana, Emmy nominations for PBS’s All-American Jazz and the soundtrack to Class C: The Only Game in Town, the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts, and the Montana Arts Council Innovator Award. In 2016, he was named a “Treasured Artist of Montana.”

I loved when Aaberg could tap those wide-open plains sounds, creating a different kind of turn-of-the-century Americana. He played live on Echoes twice, including a wonderful performance of music from his 2002 album, Christmas. It was extraordinary seeing the level of technique he brought to his performance. He was wonderful to work with, at once down-to-earth, erudite, and philosophical. I am grateful we had this kind of time with him.

Will Ackerman wrote me: “He was larger than life, and the power he brought to his composition and performance were offshoots of how he walked through this life. He was a good man and kind man, and I, for one, am grateful beyond measure for the joy and honor of having known him and worked with him.”

I think a lot of people felt that way.

Philip Aaberg died on May 23. He was 77 years old. He had pneumonia in both lungs and other complications related to chemotherapy for prostate cancer. He is survived by his wife, Patty; his sons, Jake and Michael; and his brother, Steve.