Stories Yet To Tell Norma Winstone, Klaus Gesing, Glauco Venier

• 1 Just Sometimes 06:10
• 2 Sisyphus 05:06
• 3 Cradle Song (Hoy Nazan) 04:34
• 4 Like A Lover 04:11
• 5 Rush 04:48
• 6 The Titles 04:01
• 7 Carnera 04:11
• 8 Lipe Rosize 04:57
• 9 Among The Clouds 03:32
• 10 Ballo Furlano 03:18
• 11 Goddess 05:09
• 12 En mort d'En Joan de Cucanh 02:16
• Total Runtime 52:13

Info for Stories Yet To Tell

While walking home on 8 October 2014, I was listening to Norma Winstone’s Stories Yet To Tell on my iPod. The opening song, “Just Sometimes,” had already enchanted me with its tender traversal of the heart’s shadowed chambers. Its bittersweet emotions lingered on in my mind as the second track, “Sisyphus,” held my ears captive. Named for the Corinthian king of Greek mythology forced to endlessly roll a giant boulder up a hill, the song evokes the curse of repetition in Glauco Venier’s pianism and the vain hope of breaking free in the tension of Klaus Gesing’s bass clarinet. While immersed in the atmosphere of this music, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I pressed PAUSE, removed my headphones, and turned to see my friend Andy, who had terrible news: our dear mutual friend Taylan had committed suicide that morning.

In the weeks following this tragedy, my iPod remained stuck halfway through “Sisyphus,” stymied like my desire for listening. By the time I returned to the song, I couldn’t help read the myth into Taylan’s untimely end. His life, it seemed, had thrown one boulder too many in his path, and he’d grown tired of rolling them upward in vain. While learning to cope with my grief, I was also comforted by the album’s title. It was a gentle reminder that, although he was gone, stories of Taylan’s legacy as a musician (he was an electronics genius for whom Evan Parker’s The Eleventh Hour was a life-changing record) had yet to be told. It was only a month later that I had the courage to continue where I’d left off in “Sisyphus,” which will forever be for me an elegy.

It’s not entirely morbid, however, to read a certain understanding of mortality into Winstone’s craft, singing as she so often does of moments that are fleeting, captured only through imagination. In the sadness of “Among The Clouds,” the retrograde of “Goddess,” and the wordless farewell of “En mort d’En Joan de Cucanh,” Winstone and her attuned trio understand that directions below are written in scripts above. Each song searches for meaning in a world that so often denies the divinity of simplicity. Furthermore, Winstone’s lyrics, especially in “Rush” and “The Titles,” linger on impermanence and, like the second, break down the theatrical stage of experience into its component parts.

In a few tracks, Winstone uses her voice as wordless instrument, employing melodic flight paths in the service of folk songs and lullabies. And even when she does inhabit the domicile of language, as in the tender “Like A Lover,” she does so with an insightful balance of coarse action and empty heroism, all the while keeping fear at bay with the shapes of her mouthing. She demonstrates that those of us still living must recognize that death is not an end but the first sentence in a story waiting for the spark of remembrance to reveal its narrative arc.

"To illuminate and colour such a range of material, yet preserve its essential character and remain so emphatically themselves, is remarkable. The trio is a blend of personalities that, at its best, evokes a myriad of emotions and responses with the utmost economy of means. It’s subtle, simple, sophisticated and beautiful." (Irish Times)

"Armando Manzanero's lost-love ballad Just Sometimes is magical, with Klaus Gesing's bass clarinet and Glauco Venier's piano gliding around Winstone as if comforting her. Dori Caymmi's Like a Lover is a sublime reflection, and Manfred Eicher's production superbly captures Winstone's upper-range purity and the sonorities of reeds and keys on Gesing's gliding Sisyphus." (Guardian)

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

Recorded December 2009 at Arte Suono Studio, Udine
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 Stories Yet To Tell