Norma Winstone is the most important singer on the present day British jazz scene – that rare combination of singer and vocal-musician. Miss Winstone has worked with such leading jazz composers and musicians as Mike Gibbs, Mike Westbrook, Michael Garrick and Kenny Wheeler; she has also appeared with Nucleus and now leads her own group, Edge of Time. Many readers will associate Miss Winstone with a wordless, instrumental style of singing, and in this context her voice can take on a hazy, ethereal, horn-like quality or the excitement and articulation of a trumpet. But as an interpreter of the standard song, Miss Winstone has few equals. One of the most outstanding examples of this her reading of I Love You, Porgy which, in the opinion of the writer, is the definitive version of this poignant and hauntingly beautiful Gershwin song.
Miss Winstone is a person who always wanted to sing and began doing so at the age of two. Her professional career really began as a result of going to a singing teacher: ‘He wasn’t a classical teacher, he just taught me breath control and voice production; but he also had contacts and through him I got work with local dance bands, that kind of thing. They were usually fairly bad and, in fact, I gave up singing for a couple of years after some of these experiences. During those two years I was just doing ordinary office work, which I had been doing all the time anyway, but I wasn’t doing any singing. I just took that time to think and sing to myself and work things out in my head and decide what I wanted to do and in what direction I wanted to go.
‘Well, quite by chance I visited a local pub and they had what sounded like a pretty good group playing so I asked if I could sing with them; and from that I got a regular job there. I got to know more and more musicians via the grapevine and started to get more and more work. Sometimes, though, it was less work and, on occasions, no work. I gave up my day job when I went to Germany to do American bases, which I didn’t like doing at all. It was good experience; everything is good experience.
‘At that time I was singing – I suppose you would call it jazz, people use to tell me it was jazz – just ordinary standards and contemporary songs, but I use to improvise on them. Through a friend I met John Stevens, who was then playing dance music at the Charlie Chester Club; I can’t remember when this was now, I suppose it must have been about nine or ten years ago. Well, I sat in with them at the club and John told Ronnie Scott about me. Eventually I got an audition at Ronnie’s and got some work opposite Roland Kirk in the New Place. Things have just gone on from there, really.’
Like most singers, Miss Winstone feels that there have been influences on her vocal style but she never consciously tried to copy another singer: ‘I am always getting people coming up to me and saying they can hear Ella Fitzgerald in my voice; or they can hear Cleo Lane, June Christy, Chris Connors or people I have never, ever heard of. They come along and say that I am obviously influenced by this or that singer. I think probably at times you do sound like someone else, you obviously must do.
‘When I was very young my favourite singers were people like Lena Home and Frank Sinatra, who still is my favourite male singer of those sad ballads and the only one who is really convincing for me. But as I got older I heard Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and liked that kind of singing. Carmen McRae I liked very much and all the people who were popular in the jazz field then. But anything you hear and like must influence you in some way.
‘I was interested in stretching the possibilities that were in the voice… A lot of people, critics, thought that I disregarded or destroyed the sense of the lyrics, which really wasn’t true’
‘At one time I was very interested in instrumentalists and got hooked on people like Coltrane and Miles and I think that kind of took over from singing influences for a long time. The Giant Steps era, Kind Of Blue, Eric Dolphy and that Outward Bound album – I use to listen to all of these. When I heard John Coltrane, I thought how fantastic it would be if one could develop one’s voice somehow to the capacity that he has done with his instrument. I mean, it’s impossible because he was a genius. But I was interested in stretching the possibilities that were in the voice and, I suppose, used to try and do it on the standard songs that I sang; but not always to very satisfying ends. A lot of people, critics, thought that I disregarded or destroyed the sense of the lyrics, which really wasn’t true.
‘Then I met up with Michael Garrick through working with the New Jazz Orchestra; he was the pianist at the time and sent me some of his songs which I use to sing with my own trio. One night I sat in with the band and sang a couple of these songs with them and Michael asked me to join in on some of the other numbers. So I listened to them and took some choruses, without words, after the horns. Later, Jim Phillip, who was one of the tenor players in the band at the time, left and Michael had the idea of using me in his place as an instrumental voice; so I sang the parts that Jim had played. As Michael is interested in words and poetry, it was convenient for him to have a voice in the band so he could use words when he wished. This suited me fine.’
George Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Duke Ellington are songwriters whose work Miss Winstone particularly likes to sing. In my introduction I referred to her superbly moving version of Gershwin’s I Love You, Porgy: but does a singer always feel like singing such a sad song? There must be occasions when a personal mood conflicts with the mood of the song.
‘It is such a lovely song that I would probably always enjoy singing it. But there are some times when I feel a song is not right but have got to do it because I’ve planned to sing it and it’s too late to change. But if a song is good it gets you into the mood of itself, you become part of it and it lifts you sometimes. A song like Sleeping Bee, for instance, that’s Harold Arlen, I can nearly always feel enthusiastic about, even if I hadn’t particularly wanted to sing it at the beginning; the intro comes along and I just think about the song. I suppose it is professionalism, if you like, that demands that you put everything you’ve got into the performance anyway. But it isn’t usually particularly false; a song can take you over.’
Only on one occasion, recalls Miss Winstone, has she ever been moved to tears by a song. It happened at Ronnie Scott’s when she first began singing professionally; the number was Deep Song: ‘I think it may have been a mixture of my first really big gig and my parents being present on this particular night.
‘I don’t normally get that kind of obvious emotional reaction; a set of circumstances there combined and the words were particularly appropriate to the situation and I was fairly moved then. I think you can express enough without that, without doing a Vikki Carr. It is probably very moving for an audience; but I think sometimes it is worked on and tends to become a slightly false, frenzied sort of emotion.’
Miss Winstone is one of the many singers who write their own song lyrics: ‘There has been a great upsurge in people writing their own songs and singing them, which has mainly sprung from the folk singers. When I do write some of my own it’s simply because there are songs that I want to sing that haven’t got lyrics and I don’t know anyone who can write them for me. But some lyrics are very poor; even Billie Holiday was restricted sometimes by very mediocre lyrics but she overcame them with that strange quality in her voice.’
Clifford Brown’s Joyspring is a tune to which Miss Winstone has written words: ‘It’s a good thing to sing and I have been doing it for years; it was one of the first jazz numbers I did, actually. I didn’t write all the lyrics, I wrote some but Ted Humphrey wrote most of them. I’ve written words to some of Ken Wheeler’s tunes; Don No More off the Windmill Tilter album and there’s a tune called Nothing Changes on his A Song For Someone album for which I wrote the words.
On three occasions in the past Miss Winstone has been voted the World’s Top Female Jazz Singer by the readers of the Melody Maker in its annual poll extravaganza. Cleo Laine, incidentally, currently holds this title. Miss Winstone, like most musicians, doesn’t take polls too seriously but admits that they can be useful for publicity purposes. Music polls lead on to music criticism, a subject on which Miss Winstone is very outspoken:
‘I really don’t know what to say about critics. I’ve read some incredible things they have written that sometimes I don’t think they know what they are talking about. They try to get technical about the music and it is obvious that they don’t really know’
‘I really don’t know what to say about critics. I’ve read some incredible things they have written that sometimes I don’t think they know what they are talking about. They try to get technical about the music and it is obvious that they don’t really know. They often put people down who are very good musicians simply because they don’t quite understand the music they are playing. I read this and feel that I do get something from the music that that person is playing and it makes me very angry. I think a critic should say that it doesn’t move him but he should still recognise how good it is; but often critics tend to make a meal of the fact that they haven’t liked it. I don’t always see that critics are all that necessary.’
Many people will associate Norma Winstone with the ‘avant-garde’ jazz movement but her musical activities are much wider than this: ‘I don’t really see myself in any category because I do so many different things. You know, some people who have only heard me singing ‘free’ with Nucleus doing Labyrinth or with Mike Westbrook on Metropolis are quite amazed to hear me do standards. But I like singing standards, I like singing original material and still like singing wordless solos. I quite like free improvisation but usually I like to be directed. If I am doing it with my own group and we know the mood of the piece, then we know what we want out of it; that’s when I like to use free improvisation.’
‘I did think at one time that I would like to do a record of contemporary songs and maybe treat the voice in some way and do things like singing with myself. It did cross my mind when I heard Phil Woods using his octave divider to try it somehow on the voice’
Miss Winstone still has many unfulfilled ambitions: ‘There are a few things I would like to do. First of all, I would like to recap, and do at least one record of the tunes that I used to do, and still do occasionally; a trio or small group, with standards and things like Joyspring; I moved on to something else from there and feel that kind of got missed out. But at the time nobody was interested in doing a record like that; they possibly might be now. I would also like to do a record with my own group, Edge of Time, which now consists of Henry Lowther, John Taylor (my husband), Chris Lawrence and Tony Levin. It might be nice as well to do a piano and voice album. I did think at one time that I would like to do a record of contemporary songs and maybe treat the voice in some way and do things like singing with myself. It did cross my mind when I heard Phil Woods using his octave divider to try it somehow on the voice; but I don’t think it would be possible. I don’t know exactly what can be done with electronics; I haven’t got into that.’
The composition of Miss Winstone’s group, Edge of Time, with its trumpet-voice front line, is interesting as the female voice and the trumpet share certain similarities of texture, flexibility and range: ‘I suppose I must have thought of that at the time, but I just liked the idea of having a trumpet with the voice. Some people have thought it a rather funny choice because the trumpet tends to be a rather hard, exposed-sounding instrument; it’s not the kind of instrument that blends, it always leads and, of course, the voice leads as well. I haven’t really explored the full possibilities of voice and trumpet or flugelhorn yet; I still feel there is a lot in it. Unison passages, for a start, are quite nice with trumpet and voice.’
The number of places that feature live jazz and offer employment to musicians are becoming fewer, as Miss Winstone observes: ‘There aren’t all that many places to work in London now; there’s only the Phoenix, the ICA; I mean, Ronnie Scott’s, you can’t really count Ronnie Scott’s because he rarely has any British groups there, it’s all Americans. That’s about it. The 100 Club has something once in a blue moon, occasionally the Torrington has a jazz group and there are places like the Little Theatre Club; but there’s no money in anything like that, it’s just that people go there because they want to play. I also do session work, backings and TV adverts, etc. which keeps me in London quite a bit; but we also do a lot of work out of town and are often away just for one night.
The ‘what’s on’ ads in the music papers list a large number of pubs in and around London that feature live jazz; but very often the amplification systems leave a lot to be desired, as Miss Winstone relates from personal experience: ‘They spring up at different places, the same people try to get something going but they don’t always last all that long. But the amplification is a problem. Sometime ago I had a spell of doing gigs and the amplification was so bad that I felt like never singing again, f have thought about getting my own PA equipment, which is a hell of a nuisance to have to carry around; but how can you relax if you know all the time that the sound that is coming across is nothing like the sound that is leaving you?’
As might have been expected, Miss Winstone has considered working in the States; particularly as so many British musicians and singers have succeeded so well there over recent years: ‘I have thought about it but I don’t really know what the scene is over there. I mean, Cleo Laine has done extraordinarily well in the States, and so she should. But she does a different kind of programme and I don’t really know whether there is that much work over there if you are into what’s called “avant-garde”. It is such a long way and it is difficult to know how you would be received unless, of course, you have work specifically to go over there for.’
If Miss Winstone’s talents have not yet been recognised in America, they certainly have been in Europe, particularly in Germany: ‘I was over there a year ago for six days working for the Sudwestfunk in Baden Baden for their New Jazz Meeting programme, as they call it. It is organised by Jo Berendt and they get musicians from different parts of the continent, as well as Britain and America. Charlie Mariano and Bobby Jones were there, and John Marshall, Dave MacRae and Chris McGregor from this country, as well as various continental musicians. The idea is that you can do a piece, or as many pieces as you like, for any combination of the instrumentalists that are there. You can use two musicians or you can use ten, it’s up to you. They record as much as they can during the week and then broadcast it throughout the following year.
‘It’s a lovely idea and there are no restrictions. You don’t get anybody telling you to play this or you’ve got to finish now, they just let you do what you like; then they pick the best for a final concert in Mainz. The concert we did was really well attended, lots of young people; you had to fight your way to the stand, it was so well attended. But I noticed that they seemed to like the “avant-garde” more than anything else.’
An important non-musical event for Norma Winstone this year will be the birth of her second child; she already has a two-year-old son. Then in August she will be returning to Germany to sing at a jazz festival being held near Stuttgart: ‘Other than that’, Miss Winstone comments, ‘it’s just things with Michael Garrick’s sextet, my own group and session work.’ Miss Winstone’s highly original and stylistic singing has enriched and enhanced the British jazz scene for a number of years now; it is hoped she will continue to grace it for many more to come – and achieve the much wider recognition that she so justly deserves.
