Artist Description

"Norma Winstone's instrument: an unfettered intelligence spinning tales with language...or without"
-Thomas Conrad

"Right now, she is at the peak of her form...there is no jazz singer in the country to touch her."
-Alyn Shipton

England’s finest jazz singer, Norma Winstone, appears at Joe’s Pub in support of a revelatory new album. This engagement also marks the first time that Norma will perform in the United States under her own name. She leads an inspired trio with German reedman Klaus Gesing and Italian pianist Glauco Venier in a program with sensibilities and textures spanning jazz and chamber music. A pioneer in vocal improvisation in the 1960s, Winstone came to ECM in the mid 1970s with the group Azimuth (with John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler) whose five albums recorded between 1977 and 1994 set new standards in improvised chamber music and opened up a new space between jazz and the pattern-pulses of minimalism. Norma also appeared on several other ECM recordings, and issued an album in her own name called Somewhere Called Home. Distances is her first album for the label in a decade.