Norma Winstone and NDR Radio Orchestra: A Timeless Place review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month
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- Norma Winstone fronts the newly released A Timeless Place, a 1990 radio broadcast with Hanover's NDR Radio Orchestra that sat in the archive for over three decades
- Manfred Eicher, ECM Records boss, praised Winstone as someone who "hears things differently" and tells us about it "in her own quiet way"
- The title track pairs Winstone's much-covered lyric with pianist Jimmy Rowles' tune The Peacocks — a song also explored by Mark Murphy, Jazzmeia Horn, and Cécile McLorin Salvant
- Steve Gray arranged the session for an A-list band, with the album also featuring I Loves You, Porgy and Kenny Wheeler's Sea Lady
- Winstone improvises wordlessly on Ralph Towner's The Glide and delivers what the reviewer calls a sardonic lyric to Steve Swallow's Ladies in Mercedes
Why it matters: A vocalist celebrated across 60 years and awarded an MBE, Norma Winstone's archived 1990 session with the NDR Radio Orchestra now reaches listeners — Steve Gray's orchestral arrangements frame the 'soft power' of her storytelling that ECM's Manfred Eicher called 'her own quiet way.'
