Norma Winstone, Britain's first lady of jazz
The way that Norma Winstone tells it, her rise to become one of the world’s most admired and respected jazz vocalists was seemingly simply the result of one happy accident after another.
“I didn’t really have a plan,” she says. “I just had something I wanted to do in music.”
Disarmingly modest, she adds: “I’ve managed to do everything I wanted to do — not always to the level I’ve wanted, but you know, I’m still trying.”
She is 72 now, but she has been regarded as one of Britain’s top jazz artists for more than four decades. She is a pure-voiced pioneer of singing wordlessly, using her voice as an instrument blending with other instruments.
In the last dozen years, she has been part of a refined trio that can subsume everything from Mexican and Italian folk songs to Madonna to Peter Gabriel. That group, which unites Winstone with Italian pianist Glauco Venier and German reedman, makes one of its rare North American appearances Friday in the NAC Fourth Stage.
When she was growing up after the Second World War, she thought of jazz as good music.
“The music I was listening to, I didn’t think it had a name. I didn’t put a label on it.”
In her East London home, music mattered. Her father played piano by ear and loved Fats Waller. Her mother had a very nice voice, Win- stone remembers. In their house, Frank Sinatra was a big favourite. “Still is, in my house.”
When she was seven she watched Lena Horne perform The Lady Is Tramp in the 1948 film Words And Music and asked her mother after to get the sheet music so she could sing the song.
She remembers singing at family get-togethers and even British Legion dances. “I was very shy and didn’t really relish doing it. I knew I wanted to, but I couldn’t really think how I could get to any point where I could really perform.”
She began collecting records before she was a teenager — 78s. Her first LP, bought when she was 15 or 16 with money from a weekend job, was Ella and Louis.
“It’s still a favourite. It’s just so wonderful, the way the two of them sing, and just the way that Oscar Peterson plays in such a restrained manner, really, and swings like crazy.”
Around the same time, she heard Jazz Impressions of the USA, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. “That was a big influence because that had the word jazz on it, and then I read on the back that they were improvising, whereas I thought it was all written.
Alto saxophonist “Paul Desmond’s solos were so lyrical, I copied them, I learned them. Then I read that they were improvised. So I said, I can understand that because it’s what I do going along the street — I’d always be making something up to a chord sequence in my head.”
Later, Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue album “absolutely blew me away,” Winstone says. “It had such an influence on me. I thought at that point, this is the kind of thing I want to be involved in. It sounded different, it sounded more open. I just imagined that a voice could be a part of that music rather than the voice singing the song.”
Through the 1960s, she went from pub gigs to playing with leading English jazz players including Wheeler. In 1971, she was voted top singer in the jazz poll of the U.K. music newspaper Melody Maker.
The break that made Winstone’s name internationally came a few years later, when Manfred Eicher, the visionary producer behind ECM Records, suggested that Winstone and her husband at the time, pianist John Taylor, record with their fellow Londoner, Canadian expat Kenny Wheeler.
They formed the trio Azimuth and recorded for ECM, making a sublime chamber jazz record in the mid-1970s that was unlike anything that came before it.
“I think it was very unusual,” Winstone says. “And I think it did have an influence on a lot of things that happened with vocalists after. I’m not claiming credit for it because it wasn’t my idea. But it was an idea that worked and we loved it.
“It puts you into a different way of thinking about the music and reacting to each other, and trying to leave space and not do too much.”
For the last dozen years, Winstone has worked with a trio that has roots in Azimuth.
Venier and Gesing were playing together already and they invited Winstone to do a concert. That one-off went so well this trio has made four albums, including three for Eicher’s prestigious label.
While the group is frequently billed as Winstone’s trio, it’s more democratic than that.
“It’s great,” says Winstone. “They’re from different cultures, different generations than me. They’ve both got their own things that they bring.”
Winstone now sings everything from Friulian folk songs to (It’s Not Easy) Bein’ Green. “We’re all really big Muppet fans, as it turned out,” Winstone says.
“We seem to have found a sound,” Winstone says. “If we can find music that we can apply that sound to, it’s up for grabs, really.”