Outpost of Dreams (ECM)
Norma Winstone / Kit Downes
Released July 2024
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2024
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Her first ECM recording in six years finds Norma Winstone in a new duo with pianist Kit Downes. A unique artist as both jazz vocalist and lyricist, here Norma brings her poetic sensibilities to new pieces by Downes as well as compositions by Carla Bley, Ralph Towner, and John Taylor. The programme is completed with fresh perspectives on two traditional tunes, “Black Is The Colour” and “Rowing Home.”
The duo, Norma says, was “a chance thing”, a musical unit formed almost accidentally. Winstone’s regular pianist for work in Britain, Nikki Iles, was unavailable for a gig in London, “so I booked Kit. I’d never played with him before. And of course, he could play everything immediately, and amazingly. So we did a few more concerts, and I found I responded to the sense of adventure in his playing. You never know quite what is going to happen, and I love that quality.” When London Jazz News collected a round-up of greetings for Norma’s 80th birthday, she recalls, Downes wrote: “Can’t wait to jump off musical cliffs together again in the near future.” She laughs: “That’s the way we both think of it. We’ll see where the project takes us. “
For Winstone, adding words to music has most often been a matter of living with a composition until it yields up its inner message. “I feel I’m looking for words that are already in the music. Always. That’s how I work. And if the words do come, it’s as if they were always there.” The same process was focused upon the newer pieces here although Norma was also open to narrative prompts, as on “Out Of The Dancing Sea”.
Regarding this piece, Kit Downes explains: “The Scottish painter Joan Eardley used to paint the same scene from her garden, looking at the sea, many times in a row. With it always being different in some way from the light, time of day, her own mood, weather etc., even though it was the exact same view. She also used to leave the canvas outside overnight, so bits of ‘nature’ would be stuck to it. This was the inspiration for the music Aidan O’Rourke and I wrote, which in turn was also inspired by James Robertson’s short story about her [The Painter in the collection 365 Stories].” Norma takes up the tale, in her own way, in the lyrics.
“El”, which opens the album, is a piece for Kit Downes’ baby daughter. “Suddenly we see a future / Slowly rising like a fountain”: Winstone’s sensitive words and Downes’ delicate melody are further enhanced by an almost subliminal shimmering high drone – like a halo – from a Hammond B3 organ: listen closely to hear it.
The album title Outpost of Dreams derives from the final line of Norma’s text for Downes’ “The Steppe”, where Norma equates barren landscape and emotional emptiness. Dreams recur in several of the album’s lyrics, and “In Search of Sleep”, with spoken word vocal, addresses their absence.
A couple of pieces played derived from Kit Downes’ solo repertoire, one of them being Carla Bley’s “Jesus Maria”, a tune whose roots go back to the legendary 1961 edition of the Jimmy Giuffre 3, with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow. Norma wrote lyrics for Kit’s version, unaware that Carla herself had penned a set of “quite religious” words for the original way back in the last century. “What do I do now?” Winstone asked Swallow. “Use your own words”, was the sage advice. Norma’s text finds her “imagining a special person with strange powers, who seems to understand things…The words are quite vague, at least I hope they are. I was trying not to be too specific.”
“Fly The Wind”, John Taylor’s tune – which Taylor also recorded under the alternate title “Wych Hazel” – dates back “to about 1978. After John died [in 2015], I thought I’d like to do something with it, as a dedication to a guiding spirit.”
The traditional song “Black Is The Colour” seems to invite radically different treatments – famous instances including Berio’s setting for Cathy Berberian in his Folk Songs cycle and Patty Waters’ free jazz version for ESP-Disk. ECM has previously recorded the song in interpretations by Marc Johnson’s Bass Desires group and Susanne Abbuehl. The Winstone/Downes version has a classical elegance. Norma: “It’s a song I’ve always liked, but never performed before.”
“Rowing Home” is a rarer find. Here Norma adds lyrics to a Scandinavian folk tune called “Ro Hamåt”, which she learned from a late 1970s recording by arranger pianist Bob Cornford with Kenny Wheeler, Tony Coe and the NDR Orchestra. The melody is a near relative of the English traditional song, “Searching for Lambs”.
“Beneath An Evening Sky”, composed by Ralph Towner, was first recorded in 1979 on Old Friends, New Friends, a few months after Towner guested on Azimuth’s Départ album, a new circle of musical influence opening up. Norma added lyrics to the stately tune long ago. And Downes takes a free and fragmentary approach to the arrangement.
Exploration of these pieces in concert has become increasingly open, linking the songs together with free improvised interludes.
Track Listing:
1. El (Kit Downes / Norma Winstone) 05:05
2. Fly the Wind (John Taylor / Norma Winstone) 03:11
3. Jesus Maria (Carla Bley / Norma Winstone) 04:29
4. Beneath an Evening Sky (Ralph Towner / Norma Winstone) 03:25
5. Out of the Dancing Sea (Aidan O’Rourke / Norma Winstone) 03:34
6. The Steppe (Kit Downes / Norma Winstone) 05:06
7. Nocturne (Kit Downes / Norma Winstone) 05:08
8. Black Is the Colour (Traditional) 04:34
9. In Search of Sleep (Kit Downes / Norma Winstone) 03:06
10. Rowing Home (Traditional / Norma Winstone) 03:57
Personnel:
Norma Winstone: voice
Kit Downes: piano
Recorded April 2023, at Artesuono Recording Studio, Udine, by Stefano Amerio
Mixed by Stefano Amerio and Manfred Eicher
Cover Photo by Fotini Potamia
Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Review:
Outpost of Dreams is the debut collaboration from vocalist/lyricist Norma Winstone and pianist/composer Kit Downes. Both are veteran ECM recordings artists. Winstone hasn’t issued a title with the label since 2018’s award-winning Descansado: Songs for Films, while Downes, active more recently, released Short Diary with Seb Roachford in 2023. This duo began playing shows together late in 2023 and continued into 2024. Winstone, a seven-decade veteran, has been the talk of Europe since Drake sampled Azimuth’s (Winstone with Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor) “The Tunnel” for “IDGAF.” Among this set’s ten tunes are four originals by Downes and Winstone; her lyric contributions extend here to songs by Taylor, Carla Bley, Ralph Towner, and fiddler/composer Aidan O’Rourke. There are also two folk standards, “Black Is the Color” and “Rowing Home.”
At this stage of her seven-decade career, Winstone is winning accolades for her writing as much as her supple singing — her alto instrument is undiminished by time. In opener “El,” Downes weaves impressionistic, mysterious chords in the upper-middle register as Winstone wanders with purpose inside and outside his cadences: “Stardust in the night will watch her grow/Soon become aware (constellations stare)/Everything that lives and breathes and loves filling the air…” “Fly the Wind,” by Taylor and Winstone, is sprightly; it sounds like a show tune in the singer’s phrasing, but Downes’ pianism is rooted in modern jazz. Winstone’s lyrics for Bley’s “Jesus Maria” embrace its mutated two-chord theme and reflect an unknowable Christ figure as he inhabits and transcends time. Her words for Towner’s iconic “Beneath an Evening Sky” chart the depth and strangeness of a woman’s perpetual presence in the protagonist’s wandering, solitary mind. Single “The Steppe” weds classical, jazz, and classic pop as a song of love and longing, offering: “Winds sweep across the plain/Where will I find you again/The path of a shooting star/The heart dare not follow/I’m lost in the vastness of you…I’m almost submerging/In this lonely outpost of dreams.” Downes flows, circles, and swings around and through her delivery. There are few substandard versions of “Black Is the Color.” This one, with Downes’ ghostly, wandering pianism, first excavates, then all but conceals the melody as Winstone delivers this as a tool of discovery: in certain phrases, she pays tribute to Nina Simone’s stellar recording. Downes is masterful; he never intrudes on Winstone’s expression yet establishes the piano as a separate lyric voice. The closing traditional sea shanty “Rowing Home” is almost unrecognizable. Downes creates darkly tinged post-bop harmonics under the melody as Winstone improvises inside the words and phrases while changing the tune’s shape with her vocalizing. Usually sung by fishermen returning home, this version comes from a bereft protagonist, and it is as poignant as it is resonant. Outpost of Dreams is a quiet, gentle, even tenderly poetic masterpiece that represents music-making as an organic yet adventurous hub of meaning.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
