(Reprinted from the September 2024 issue of Downbeat magazine. Photo: Michael Putland)
UK singer Norma Winstone took the title of her new album, Outpost of Dreams, from the first piece that she and pianist Kit Downes had ever written together—his music, her lyrics. She listened over and over again to Downes’ melancholic instrumental until the words for their tune, “The Steppe,” began to take shape.
“I remember the starting line,” Winstone said in a remote interview with Downbeat. “It’s about a feeling of losing somebody, and there’s no way that you can find them.”
The song’s last line, though, gives the album its thematic title: “I thought that I heard you today/The slow drip, drip of a fantasy/I’m almost submerging/In this lonely outpost of dreams.”
Conveying such strong emotions—without a whiff of the maudlin or the precious—is Winstone’s bailiwick as both a lyricist and vocal interpreter of modern jazz composition. Her lyric-writing in particular stands out for its captivating imagery: “A Timeless Place”—her poetic adaptation of pianist Jimmy Rowles’ breathless ballad, “The Peacocks”—has become something of a vocal jazz classic, recorded by singers as distinguished as Mark Murphy, Tierney Sutton, and Jazzmeia Horn.
This said, Winstone’s authorial intent seems eminently personal, almost private. And she writes to her own vocal mien, suited for more sparing melodic lines and nuanced jazz soundscapes. Such vulnerability is all the more visible in a duo setting like Outpost of Dreams, where Winstone’s vocals stand starkly against the minimal background of Downes’ intuitive playing. Creatively, there is no place to hide.
The idea of recording an album together—and a duo record specifically—was Downes’. Winstone and Downes had first met when he was subbing for Nikki Iles, Winstone’s regular trio pianist, on a London gig; the easy musical rapport between the two had sparked that initial conversation.
It was only a coincidence that soon thereafter ECM contacted Winstone about doing another album—the first for her longstanding label after a six-year hiatus. Given Downes’ professed interest in recording together, she asked him to join her on the project.
“Kit loved the duo recording that I did with [pianist] John Taylor, Like Song, Like Weather, and he preferred to use just voice and piano,” Winstone recalled. “[By then] we’d done one or two concerts together, and they were always last-minute—but it seemed to work because I love the sense of danger in music. That’s why I loved working with John Taylor—you never knew what was going to happen. It could go anywhere.”
During the 50+ years of her career, Winstone herself has garnered impressive accolades for her ability to “go anywhere” vocally, whether reframing a standard, fronting jazz ensembles of any size, or exploring experimental vocal improvisation. She’s been known mostly for the latter, however—especially with the avant-garde trio Azimuth, formed in 1977 with her then-husband Taylor and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. Winstone first recorded for ECM as a part of Azimuth and has since appeared on more than a dozen of the label’s releases.
Her ECM work gained a new audience more recently when rapper Drake sampled a track from Azimuth’s eponymous debut on his 2023 album For All The Dogs; a one-minute clip from “The Tunnel,” featuring Winstone’s etheric voice and pensive lyrics, opens “IDGAF,” one of Drake’s chart-topping singles. That Azimuth’s sound still resonates with artists and listeners alike almost 50 years on speaks to the universality of its appeal—due in no small part to Winstone’s contributions. The 10-track lineup on Outpost of Dreams furthers this legacy.
The opener, “El”—the second of Downes’ four compositions on the album—brims with forward motion and optimism, and his lullaby-like solo (honoring his young daughter) shows how expertly this composer commandeers simplicity. By contrast, “Nocturne,” a piece that he’d originally written for classical piano, proved more difficult as a rangy vocal piece, but Winstone meets Downes’ harmonic challenge with her haunting, resolute lyrics. Last, Downes fashioned a free composition to enhance Winstone’s spoken-word performance on “In Search of Sleep,” a sorrowful musing that underscores the album’s reflective theme.
The pair also tackled selections by some of Winstone’s earlier co-creators: The rhythmic “Fly the Wind,” with music by Taylor, afforded Winstone the space to play with an equally cadenced vocalese line. And composer Ralph Towner’s “Beneath an Evening Sky,” a time-shifting elegy, became a free exposition under Downes’ touch, prompting some of the most romantic lyrics on the record.
Winstone also wanted to include Carla Bley’s “Jesus Maria,” drawn by its tricky, intervallic melody. Not knowing that the tune already had words, she wrote her own delicate verse, with a nod from Steve Swallow, Bley’s longtime partner. (Of note, Winstone and Swallow, frequent collaborators, are releasing their own duo album on ECM later this year.)
Winstone also found herself captivated by a radio broadcast of fiddler Aidan O’Rourke’s “Every Morning She Steps Out Of The Backdoor,” only to realize at its end that Downes was the other half of the on-air duo (playing harmonium, no less). She chose to add the song to the album, retitled as “Out Of The Dancing Sea,” her sensate lyrics retaining all of the original’s joyous feel.
Finally, toward the end of the record, Winstone added two traditional tunes: the Celtic air “Black Is The Color,” with the original words, in a surprise turn as an expressionistic jazz tune, and “Rowing Home,” a Scandinavian folk song reharmonized by Downes. In this final track, Winstone’s lyrics again return to a sense of loss: “The perfect moment is gone,” she sings.
After the album’s July release, Winstone had several gigs booked throughout the UK, with one of especial interest: the We Out Here jazz festival with her two sons, drummer Leo Taylor and singer/guitarist Alex Taylor. For this particular show she planned to pull from both her first solo record, Edge of Time (Arco), and her sons’ album with their father, 2081 (Cam Jazz), released after his passing in 2015. Post-Drake, she said, given the renewed interest in her 1970s work, she wanted to call the project “Edge of Time Revisited.”
“I don't know what might come of that,” she added. “But I'm up for exploring.” As always.