"We're all accompanying each other": The Norma Winstone interview

On April 25, 2025, I interviewed English vocalist-lyricist Norma Winstone about her new album Seascape with the Atlantic Jazz Collective, which is out today on Alma Records. The Atlantic Jazz Collective also includes German-born, Newfoundland-based pianist Florian Hoefner, Canadians Mike Murley on saxophone and Jim Vivian on bass, and American drummer Joe LaBarbera.

Winstone, 83, has a career spanning more than five decades. She is best known for her many albums as a leader and for her collaborations with Kenny Wheeler, including the ensemble Azimuth with her former husband John Taylor. She performed at Capilano University with students from the jazz program in 2016 and returns to the BlueShore Centre at CapU next Saturday, May 10, as part of the Atlantic Jazz Collective's Canadian album release tour.

Please enjoy my full conversation with Norma Winstone. I made some light transcript editing for clarity.

CDs are available for Seascape here. Stream the album here.

WC: Okay, so I saw that for Seascape, the Canadian tour, it starts on the 8^th of May in Edmonton. It reaches where I am in Vancouver on the 10^th, and it ends on the 17^th in Toronto. So you are currently at home?

NW: I am, yeah. Yeah.

WC: What is that like for you now, at this stage of what has been such a long and amazing career? How often do you find yourself doing something like this and going on the road, versus how often are you at home?

NW: I mean, I've been busy on and off in this last year, you know, quite. Sometimes just for odd things, like I went to South Korea for one concert last October. Japan in November for two concerts. And I must say, I don't really feel like doing too much of those kind of journeys anymore. You know, unless you're traveling business class [laughs]. But even then, it's not great, and so I'd rather not do those. But Europe, you know, and Canada is not too bad. They're friends.

I like Canada, I have Canadian friends. And of course, Mike Murley and Jim Vivian were in the Maritime Jazz Orchestra that Azimuth recorded with a couple of times. Also, I'm in a group with Mike that tours in Europe, where we play Kenny Wheeler's music. It's called [Norma Winstone &] The North. A couple of Scandinavian musicians, Mike, me, and English pianist Nikki Iles. Yeah. That's nice. In fact, I just missed seeing them. They were passing through London, Jim and Mike. They'd been to, to see the snooker in Sheffield, like the Snooker World Championships. I was unable to meet them, because my husband was there, but I'll see them soon.

WC: Gotcha. Yeah, The North, that's the album Wheeler with Words.

NW: Yes, that's right.

WC: I was going to ask you about the Maritime Jazz Orchestra too, because that's the connection, too. Mike Murley and Jim Vivian played in it. The album Siren Song. Justin Time Records, Canadian release, that's already quite a while ago now. But that's an important antecedent to this group, I guess.

NW: Yeah, I suppose it is. Jim, I dunno, he managed to get some money and asked me to go over there – I think the year before last – to St. John's and do a concert and a recording. Which was quite a surprise, you know, because I hadn't really been in touch with him. I'd been in touch with Mike, but they're great friends anyway, and they talk all the time. And in combination with doing a workshop in Antigonish, they shared the costs.

And so I managed to come and do the concert in St. John's and the recording, stayed a couple of days, and then went to Antigonish. I did a couple of days there. So that was very nice. But then this came up, which was, I suppose, trying to promote the recording that we made. I'm looking forward to playing and singing.

WC: Yeah. Can I ask you about the tune, is it “Raffish”? Is that how you say that track?

NW: Oh, “Raffish”, yes.

WC: Yeah. So on one hand, it's quite different than all the other tracks. It’s a Ralph Towner composition. I heard it on guitar from his record.

NW: Yeah, well, I loved it. I didn't know whether we'd be able to do it. I sang it with Ralph a couple of times, with just guitar. And I thought, well, it seems to me it could work, you know? They liked it, so we did it, but yeah, so funny. I mean, “Raffish”, I just imagined the kind of person that you could refer to as a raffish kind of guy, you know? And just wrote words accordingly.

WC: That's a very maritime spirit, isn't it?

NW: Yes. Yeah.

WC: I found a video of your performance with this group of “Raffish” and the video is from September of 2023 in St. John's. That is the exact recording that ended up on the record, this live video performance.

NW: Yeah, we, we did record it again in studio conditions, although it's the same place we were using. But somehow the live one had something, so we used that one instead.

WC: And that makes the album end with applause.

NW: Of course! Yeah. I didn't think of that. I mean, they said, what do you think? Which version? And I said, well, I think that the live one is good. And they all agreed that's what they wanted to use. Yeah, so it ends with applause.

WC: So that's the only such track like that. The others are all studio recordings. And you made the studio recording around that time?

NW: Yeah, we made the studio recording two days after we did the concert. But actually, no, I think there is another one. I think “The Widow in the Window”, we chose the live one rather than the studio one.

WC: Yeah, that being a Kenny Wheeler tune from a Kenny Wheeler album.

NW: Yes.

WC: So at some point you would've gotten to hear back both things, right? Like you would hear back the studio, you'd hear back what you played live from like the same time, and chose.

NW: Yeah. They sent them to me when they'd sort of done a rough mix, to see what I thought. I mean, I know it's my name on it, but I'm not the only one on it. So we all have to be satisfied, I think, with what we did, as much as you can be. And you’ve always got reservations. I had reservations about [the title being] Seascape because we actually recorded the Johnny Mandel tune, “Seascape”. I wrote some words. I hadn't got permission to use them, but we did record it. And I could have, you know, not claimed anything for it, but I didn't. I wasn't happy with that recording, but they called the album Seascape, although “Seascape” isn't on it anyway [laughs].

WC: Yeah, I mean that's appropriate. That's kind of cool. But it's cool to know that that was an additional recording that you made, that didn't make the final track list. This could be quite a broad question, I suppose. But how different does it feel now being a leader or a co-leader in a collective project at this point in your life versus in, say, the 70s, 80s, or whatever other time period you'd reference? What has changed about how you view it, or how you feel being in the role?

NW: I don't think there's any change, because I've never felt like a leader. I've always felt as if I was cooperating with people. Even when the thing’s in my name – you know, I have to say the ‘Norma Winstone plus Quartet’ or ‘plus Trio’ – it's always the same relationship with the musicians. I don't do things if they're not happy playing them. I've always worked like that. I suppose I've always felt like I’m part of something, rather than the one standing out front and everyone's accompanying me. I never feel like that. Well, I've never been happy feeling like that. I think it doesn't bring the best out of people.

WC: I love that you said that, because I listened to you talk about your recent album with Kit Downes when you joined The ECM Podcast.

NW: Oh yeah!

WC: And there was one particular way you phrased what I think is the same feeling that you're saying here, where you were talking about your early days and how you learned, like what kind of role, what would be available to you as a vocal improviser. I think what you said, in that conversation that happened last year, was you wanted to find a way that the vocals could be involved. I thought ‘involved’ was the perfect word, because it presented a nice relationship there, that isn't like a leader or like a front person.

NW: No. It's integrated into the music rather than out front. People ask me often in interviews, what do you expect from an accompanist? Well, I never think of people as accompanists. I mean, they're accompanying me. We're all there accompanying each other really. But I think people always think the singer needs certain things, you know? I guess I do, but things that would make me happy would make another singer unhappy, the way people play. I've never thought of being accompanied. Somebody asked once, when John Taylor and I did a workshop for students, one of them said, John, do you have to make sure that Norma has a note? And John just looked bewildered, he said, no, I never think of it. He said, I just play, and she sings. And I said that if something goes wrong, if I come in wrong, I'll get lost, and we enjoy finding the right place. You improvise until you get to where you should be. That's fun.

WC: Yeah. You don't see them as accompanists. You feel that they are just people who are involved with you in the moment, in the same way that you wanna be with them.

NW: Yeah. Absolutely.

WC: So, the musician who was a new collaborator to you in the Atlantic Jazz Collective is Florian Hoefner, right? What's it like working with him and meeting him?

NW: Oh, it was great. He's a great player and obviously very good at getting some gigs [laughs]. I think he's responsible for making the effort to get this tour together. Yeah, he's great. And also, it was so nice to see Joe LaBarbera again. I hadn't seen him for some years, and so it's great to sing with him again. The last time we recorded was Well Kept Secret with Jimmy Rowles, which was a long, long time ago. But yeah, he's wonderful. Of course, I loved the last Bill Evans trio that he was in.

WC: Yeah, with Marc Johnson.

NW: Yeah. Wow.

WC: This will be the first time that I’ll have had the chance to see him, Joe, live. I don't think I have yet. On the 10th of May coming up.

NW: Yeah. Not long, is it?

WC: No, not long. But I have heard you once, and I definitely wanted to ask you about this. I was a student at Capilano University in [North] Vancouver. I didn't play with you, but all my friends did: my friends who were my class peers. I had moved on to different work and studies by that point, but I was still in touch with those friends, and I came to hear you play with the students of Capilano University. It was the spring of 2016.

NW: Was it? Well, I couldn't remember. Yeah, so it was almost 10 years ago. I remember being there. I always loved coming to Canada. I came over and played with Don Thompson in the first place. You know, I hope to see Don when I'm over this time, but I haven't seen him for some years now. He's a great bass player as well as pianist, I mean, he's an incredible musician.

WC: Maybe there's a record here that I don't know, but have you recorded with him?

NW: No.

WC: Okay!

NW: Well, we did record some things, but they never came out. I've got some recordings here that I did with him. We went into a studio, but nothing ever happened. Whether he wasn't that happy with it or I... well, I can't remember. We just did it while I was there once. We went into a studio and recorded some pieces.

WC: It was piano-vocal duo that you recorded?

NW: Yeah. And sometime we may have done a bass-voice thing, I don't know. It's going back now some years, I can't remember, you know.

WC: I wanted to ask you about another project that has come out recently. Some Days Are Better: The Lost Scores by the Royal Academy of Music Jazz Orchestra, Kenny Wheeler Legacy, on the Greenleaf Music label. [WC: Greenleaf are my client at Chernoff Music.] This is a fantastic project. I wonder if you wanted to share anything about your time with that.

NW: I was just asked to go! Of course it was fantastic going to the studio where the Beatles were, the famous studio with the pedestrian crossing outside. I used to do sessions there sometimes. I think it was the idea of the Americans that we should do that, you know? At Abbey Road. I hadn't been there for some years, and people are still taking photographs of that pedestrian crossing [laughs]. It was great to be there in that great mixture of musicians there, some from the Academy and some from this college in Miami. Evan Parker came and played on it, and we did a duet. God knows what that was like, I've not heard it actually. You’ve probably got to download it, I think. I don't think it, does it exist as a physical CD or–

WC: It does. Yeah.

NW: Oh, it does. Why haven't I got one now? [Laughs.]

WC: I dunno [laughs].

NW: I have to see, see about that.

WC: Somebody needs to do something!

NW: But yeah, it's like The North thing. A couple of tracks were put out, then I think it's a CD, but I don't have it. I must catch up to myself [laughs].

WC: I wanted to ask you about the song. “Where Do We Go From Here”.

NW: Oh, yeah.

WC: Can you talk about the history of that song, and what that song is for you? I love that song.

NW: Yeah. Kenny wrote that for, I think it was his 70th birthday tour. I wasn't involved in the tour or the concert, but he just suddenly said, could you write some words for this song? “Where Do We Go From Here”. I'd never heard it, I think he'd just written it then.

What can I say? I don't know. With writing words, I don't ever have a plan. Of course to have a title is good. “Where Do We Go From Here”? It's very open, of course, and a bit mysterious, like all Kenny's titles. I just thought it would be a nice one to do with this lineup. I just thought, oh, well, where do we go from here? I dunno where the words came from. Just a feeling that I got from that title. People, or somebody, or all of us are sometimes in a situation where you're not sure which way to go, you know? “A million whispered cries from statues in dusty halls.” I mean, I dunno where that came from! You watch the passing of time, it's like almost if you're in a museum, you know. There were these figures there, thinking, where do we go from here? Actually, it reminds me of... You don’t know Spike Milligan, do you?

WC: No, no.

NW: He was one of the goons with Peter Sellers in England. He just had a show called Q... and every now and again things would freeze and he'd say, what do we do next? Oh no, what do we do now? It's just like, well, where do we go from here? Yeah. Nobody knows.

WC: That's one of the lyrical things that sticks with me after the times that I've listened to the album so far. There are a lot of big questions. Like, there's that one, and then I think it's at the end of “Widow in the Window”, a question: “What is it for?”

NW: Yeah. I wrote those many years ago when I... something horrible happened in my life, and I wrote them, and I could never sing them, because it was too much or too close. And a singer called Thierry Péala from Paris, he did an album with Kenny, and I was on that too. He sang the, the words there, but I had never recorded them, never sung them before. And I thought, no, it's time.

Yeah, there's questions. It's like when, you know, you'd lose somebody that close. You’re not sure why, which way to go, which way to turn. Of course, eventually you find out. But in that situation, I was really thinking of a widow, someone who'd lost a partner. Just remembering all the things that they did and talked about. But at that point when it's just happened, there's no answer. You're just wondering.

WC: Yeah. I wanted to ask you another thing about when you came here and played with my student friends. Do you recall the student from my cohort there, a vocalist, Natasha D’Agostino?

NW: Oh, yes. Yeah, I do remember.

WC: Okay. So I'll tell you. But I would love, if you're willing to... because in January of 2019, Natasha passed away.

NW: Oh no...

WC: She was in a vehicle accident on January 6th, 2019, so about six years ago. It was a huge blow to our cohort. She was one of the students who was there when you were there. I don't know what the connection was like there. But yeah, that's what happened. So we remember her very, very fondly.

NW: Well, I do... now that you’re telling me this, it does actually ring a bell, as if somebody did tell me. Somebody, a teacher from your school. I remember the name. It's quite the name, isn't it? Natasha D’Agostino. There were very nice students there. I know I really enjoyed being with them. I guess I must have had an individual time with her. I think I probably did. I think she was in touch with me after I left there. But I don't think I have anything that she recorded. Did she record? Did she leave any...?

WC: She did actually, she released an album. It was at the end of 2018. But even that would've been a little bit subsequent to when you came here. So maybe she did correspond with you or something on the way to that, but she did end up making one album's worth of music. Yeah.

NW: Oh... I mean, I meet singers all over the place, young singers. I always feel that I want to encourage them to have confidence in themselves. To just think, well, I've got a voice, and I'm gonna do what my voice can do. Not not trying to do things that you can't do, but just find out what your voice is best at. Think about that rather than, oh, I've got to do this and I've got to sing this, and I've gotta be able to sing that solo. Which is one beef that I have a bit sometimes, with colleges, for singers. They treat singers like second-class saxophones. They're supposed to learn all these... I think, well, you don't have to do that.

I learned Miles Davis solos only because I listened and listened so much that they went in. From the time of Kind of Blue, only singable things. The others I couldn't sing, but I remembered. That's where I learned everything. There was no education when I started, no jazz education anywhere, so you could only learn from the people on record that really could do it. Not just singers, but the instrumentalists. That's what I was interested in, perhaps wrongly in a way, because I think singing of words, a singing of a song is so important. At the time when I was searching for a different way, I thought the only important thing was to try and be like an instrument, to not sound like any particular instrument but use the voice as a sound. Which is what I suppose I've always done. And somehow I met the right people, and I stumbled along and ended up doing what I'm doing. No real plan, just the urge to do something and sing whatever I can.

WC: There's a spirit there. It's really important for those of us who come up through the educational environment – because that's more of how it looks right now – to hear that from you, because you’ve got to see it in what to me kind of feels like the more true way. It kind of breaks us out of the educational bubble, when we can experience that from you.

NW: Yeah. I hope so. I try to do that, because people ask me to teach, and I dread teaching. Because I think I don't know anything that I can pass on. It's silly, I know, but I... most people when they teach, I suppose they teach what they were taught, you know? So you at least you have a structure. But I never did that. I just learned by listening to things and trying to copy, and sing well. I did sing a lot of things I didn't like particularly, but it was a means to an end. I was just always interested in seeing whether the voice could become part of the sound. And of course, with Kenny, that was the fantastic opportunity. I learned so much from standing next to him and absorbing his sound, and trying to make my sound fit his.

I always thought of the voice as a sound. It's a sound like another instrument, which is why I try not to use too many other syllables. The bebop syllables wouldn't suit me at all, the kind of music that I do. So I try to see if I can just use the sound. Of course you have to sometimes use consonance, because you're, you're singing a phrase which needs, you need something to shape it. But I really try to make those, those syllables as little-sounding as possible. I was really lucky that I met Kenny and he asked me to join that band. People often said to me, oh, did he ever ask you about... did he ever say anything? I said, no, you might get something from him like, “Sounded good tonight.” That's about it. He never, he never asked my range. He'd just sometimes say, “Sorry it's a bit high.” That's, you know, what he'd written was a bit high, but he didn't have any intention of changing it [laughs], so I had to do it. Thrilling, really. I loved, just loved what he wrote. It was wonderful to sing.

WC: We love hearing it on all the many records you made. Yeah. Is there anything else on your mind? Thank you for spending this time with me.

NW: Oh, no, not really. I'd hope I haven't talked too much.

WC: No, not at all.

NW: Disturbed your train of thought...

WC: No, that's not what it's about. I want to hear from you!

NW: It’s hard to stop me if I get going, talking about music. And trying to explain what it means, you know? It's a mystery, isn't it? I can't believe I'm still doing it and still loving doing it. And I just hope, I hope that I'll know when the voice starts to go, that I will know and stop doing it. But at the moment, touch wood, everything seems to be okay. You'll find out! I hope you know it's still okay. It was last weekend when I used it, so...

WC: We'll hear you in Canada, and we'll know it's okay. And of course the record's phenomenal. So yeah, I'm happy that I got to hear it and that's coming out soon, and that you'll be here soon.

NW: So will I meet you in Vancouver?

WC: Yes, I hope so. I mean, you can never guarantee a hundred percent, because you're so busy at these things, I know. But yes, I'll be there.

NW: Good, good. I'm looking forward to it.

WC: Me too.