My review of Norma Winstone's Dance Without Answer, today at All About Jazz.
If there's a single accomplishment that can be attributed to ECM Records—though there are, of course, many in its 45-year history—it's that it welcomes unusual instrumentation with open arms, affording such collaborations the opportunity to grow, to evolve, and build a new language. From the pan-cultural CODONA Trilogy (2009), which collected the three genre-defying recordings made in the late '70s/early '80s by Collin Walcott, Don Cherry and Nana Vasconcelos, to Jon Balke's Siwan (2009), which collected, amongst others, Fourth World progenitor Jon Hassell, Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui and the 12-piece Baroque ensemble Barokksolistene for an epic recording that remains criminally overlooked to this day, ECM has consistently either been on the lookout for or made its own suggestions to combine musicians and instruments that might, on paper, seem to be anywhere from unorthodox to flat-out incompatible. That, more often than not, they are ultimately proved successful only bolsters the reputation Manfred Eicher and his label have built for allowing imagination to fly, unfettered by conventional constraints.
A case in point is singer Norma Winstone's decade-old trio with pianist Glauco Vernier and reed multi-instrumentalist—but largely, in this context, bass clarinetist—Klaus Gesing. First coming together for Chamber Music (EmArcy/Universal, 2003), it was when the group began recording for ECM with the sublime i (2008), followed by the equally sublime Stories Yet to Tell (2010), that the trio began to garner the international acclaim it richly deserves. Dance Without Answer continues the trio's winning streak, a collection of original music and covers that might be surprising, had the trio not already proven its ability to build repertoires drawn from disparate sources, ranging from Peter Gabriel and Erik Satie to Tom Waits.
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