Dance Without Answer Norma Winstone, Klaus Gesing, Glauco Venier

• 1 Dance Without Answer 05:18
• 2 Cucurrucucu Paloma 04:08
• 3 High Places 07:11
• 4 Gust da essi viva 04:41
• 5 Ator Ator 02:50
• 6 Live to Tell Music 04:59
• 7 It Might Be You 04:49
• 8 Time of No Reply 03:58
• 9 San Diego Serenade 04:40
• 10 A Breath Away 05:11
• 11 Bein' Green 04:44
• 12 Slow Fox 05:12
• 13 Everybody's Talkin' 04:53
• Total Runtime 01:02:34

Info for Dance Without Answer

The great British jazz singer Norma Winstone once again casts her net wide for source material for this third ECM album with Italian pianist Glauco Venier and German clarinetist and saxophonist Klaus Gesing. Alongside new pieces by Winstone/Gesing and by Venier, the trio covers tunes by singer-songwriters Nick Drake, Fred Neil and Tom Waits. They take a fresh approach to Madonna’s “Live To Tell”, and to Dave Grusin’s “It Might Be You”, as well as Ralph Towner’s “A Breath Away” (now with lyrics by Norma) and “Bein’ Green”, a children’s song elevated to jazz standard status by Sinatra, Stan Kenton, Ray Charles and many more. “As Winstone moves ever farther from the Great American Songbook,” All About Jazz observed, “it's certain that, with band mates as sympathetic as Gesing and Venier, there's precious little she can't do.”

Dance Without Answer pools material from diverse sources. Alongside the striking self-penned songs, there are pieces by idiosyncratic singer/songwriters Fred Neil, Nick Drake and Tom Waits, as well as tunes associated with the cinema, with contemporary pop, with a children’s television show and more.

The album is bookended by farewells. The opening title track began life as an instrumental by Klaus Gesing called “Tanz ohne Antwort” (“Dance Without Answer”). Norma translated its title and outlined a lyrical plot to match the music’s bittersweet moods, drawing out a tale of incomplete goodbyes. Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” has the last word, its protagonist in search of some companionable silence, beyond the reach of the world’s babble. A folk scene favourite before it became associated with John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy movie, it is a piece that has been in the Winstone’s trio’s live repertoire from the beginning.

For Klaus Gesing’s tune “High Places” Norma added lyrics inspired by the French Canadian film Incendies, directed by Denis Villeneuve. “I’m not so much telling the story of the film, as responding to its atmosphere. A lot of my lyrics are ‘filmic’ in fact. I tend to think visually when I’m casting around for words.“

Further connections to film include Tomasz Mendez’s “Cucurrucucu Paloma”. Norma loved Caetano Veloso’s version, which is heard in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her, and penned her own English words for the tune. Dave Grusin’s “It Might Be You” was the theme song of Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie. And “Bein’ Green” derives from the Muppet Show. “It was Klaus’ idea to try that,” Winstone says, “but we’re all staunch Muppet fans. It’s an interesting little song – about outsiders, really. No wonder many jazz musicians have been drawn to it”. The long list includes Sinatra, Ray Charles, Stan Kenton, and Shirley Horn. The Patrick Leonard/Madonna tune “Live To Tell” is another one that has attracted the attention of improvisers over the years. Glauco Venier brought it to the trio after hearing Bill Frisell’s version. Winstone honours the shape of the song (“we’re closer to Madonna’s version than Bill’s”).

Tom Waits’s “San Diego Serenade”, played as a duet for voice and bass clarinet, has been a staple of the group’s live work, and was recorded in an earlier version in 2002 for their debut album “Chamber Music”.

Norma has, on a number of previous occasions, added lyrics to Ralph Towner tunes. A comrade of long standing, Towner recorded with the Winstone/Taylor/Wheeler Azimuth trio in 1979. “A Breath Away” is drawn from Ralph’s 1995 recording “Lost and Found”.

The album’s Italian component works some striking contrasts. “Gust Da Essi Viva”, a poem by Novella Cantarutti, who wrote in Friulian dialect, was previously set by Glauco for symphony orchestra and the Big Band Udine. “A Tor A Tor” is a Friulian filastrocca, a bouncing nursery rhyme set to music by Venier.

The sparse instrumentation – a reed instrument, a piano, a voice – adapts itself to all these different contexts: it has encouraged creativity rather than imposed limitations. Winstone clearly enjoys the sense of space in the music, and the silences that can be explored or allowed to resonate, as well as the improvisational flexibility that the players share.

Norma Winstone, voice
Glauco Venier, piano
Klaus Gesing, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone

Recorded December 2012 at Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineered by Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Norma Winstone Trio
An English singer, a German reedman, an Italian pianist. Sometimes called Distances (they prefer this), sometimes the Norma Winstone Trio or Norma Winstone’s Chamber Music, by any name a remarkable group whose intimate performances encompass a great arc of music. Here are three adventurous musicians united by a profound feeling for song. The stark instrumentation – voice, piano, bass clarinet soprano sax – seems never to limit their repertoire, but to encourage the players to explore widely, and to make musical use of the available space.

Jazz ballads, old and new, find their place alongside – for instance – adaptations of Friulian folk songs, and ‘chamber’ pieces influenced by classical or contemporary composition. Textures, colours and rhythms may be drawn from scattered, surprising sources: a sudden bright flash of calypso, perhaps, or the hypnotic lulling of an Armenian cradle song. Winstone, Gesing and Venier have played songs from Cole Porter to Komitas, borrowed melodies from Satie and Coltrane, culled lyrics from James Joyce poems and Christina Rosetti nursery rhymes. What they take they make their own, much of the material they compose themselves, and most of the words are Norma’s. As both singer and lyricist she has few contemporary peers: her words seem to float up from the music’s expressive core.

Nonetheless, this is not a story of singer and accompanists. If the group is Norma’s, as some promoters insist, she was the last to join it. In reality it is a band in which creative responsibilities are very equally shared. Glauco Venier and Klaus Gesing have collaborated in musical projects since the mid-90s, including a long running duo. They invited Norma to join them for Italian concerts a decade ago and the singer soon recognized a potential for developing a trio music with its own specific character, meanwhile documented on three outstanding recordings: “Chamber Music” (Universal, 2004), the Grammy-nominated “Distances” (ECM, 2008), and “Stories Yet To Tell” (ECM, for release Autumn 2010).

The recordings give an index of the group’s range, and reveal Venier and Gesing as gifted composers and distinctive instrumentalists. Venier’s choice of notes and his harmonizations are strikingly original, and Gesing has established his own methodology for bass clarinet in particular, vaulting between rhythm and melody functions, and matching textures and phrases with Winstone’s subtle voice. From the beginning of her life in jazz, Norma Winstone has wanted to be part of the ensemble, rather than a frontwoman. She uses her voice ‘instrumentally’, to interweave improvised lines with her partners and participate in the blossoming harmony. When singing texts, she draws her fellow musicians ever deeper into the storylines sketched by the lyrics, until the plot is illuminated from three perspectives. It is a point of honour with this trio never to tell the tale, or play the music, the same way twice. One reason, amongst many, why it is important to experience the group live as well as on disc.

Booklet for Dance Without Answer