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When Norma Winstone, the peerless English vocalist and lyricist, reached 80 in 2021 – still in entrancing voice – a cascade of tributes included one from ECM Records boss Manfred Eicher, legendary master of doing more with less in new music: “She hears things differently, and tells us about them in her own quiet way.” Winstone’s confiding storytelling could have struggled in a noisy world, but landmark albums, the accolades of peers and fans and an MBE have confirmed its soft power across 60 years. So does the release of A Timeless Place, a long-archived 1990 radio broadcast with Winstone fronting Hanover’s NDR Radio Orchestra.
The title track is her much-covered lyric (Mark Murphy, Jazzmeia Horn and Cécile McLorin Salvant have explored it) to pianist Jimmy Rowles’ lovely tune The Peacocks. Glimpsed happiness, missed chances and the sounds and colours of emotions (“I’m drowning now, slowly sinking in a sea of blue and green”) typify Winstone’s materials, and her lustrous low sounds and vaulting octave leaps constantly mutate the implications of words.
Learned over years alongside star instrumentalists, her surefooted improv skill guides her wordless variations on guitarist Ralph Towner’s skittish The Glide; she mischievously curveballs her sardonic lyric to Steve Swallow’s Ladies in Mercedes; and an exquisite account of I Loves You, Porgy distils the song’s confusion of resignation and hope, as she also does on Kenny Wheeler’s Sea Lady. “I’ve always been on the edge, always felt like I was swimming against the tide and somehow couldn’t stop,” Winstone once said. Quiet as it is, this fine session, enhanced by her friend and collaborator Steve Gray’s arrangements for an A-list band, catches that spirit. It still endures in Winstone’s work today.
Also out this month
Sangam & Friends (Blue Note) vivaciously joins recordings from a 2009 Mumbai concert by the tabla master Zakir Hussain, saxophonist Charles Lloyd and drummer Eric Harland with a contemporary version of their Sangam Trio, formed in Hussain’s honour, featuring Lloyd, Harland and a fine Indian ensemble. Dry-toned tenor lines and feathery flute musings cruise over racing tabla percussion and Harland’s jazz-drums hustle, while Vijay Prakash’s soaring voice enhances an enchanting east-west exchange. Richard Spaven, a UK percussion peer to beat-stretching US jazz/hop-hop virtuosi Chris Dave and Mark Guiliana, shows his wider creativity with Light of Day (Edition), mingling jazz, avant-funk, Celtic inflections and bluesy guitar with classy guests including trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær. And young Israeli virtuoso guitarist/bassist Tal Mashiach, a longtime member of Anat Cohen’s imaginative bands, fuses Brazilian, Israeli and Greek music with a songlike composing skill on the captivating Who’s Around? (Anzic).
