Norma Winstone

Norma Winstone

Norma Winstone is a British jazz singer and lyricist from Bow, East London. She is known for wordless improvisation as well as vocal jazz performance, and her work also sits within avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, free jazz and electronica.

Career

Winstone begins singing in bands around Dagenham in the early 1960s. She joins Michael Garrick’s band in 1968, and her first recording follows the next year with Joe Harriott. She records one album under her own name in 1972.

Over a career spanning more than forty years, she works with a number of leading British jazz musicians, including Garrick, Mike Westbrook and the pianist John Taylor, who is her former husband. With Taylor and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, she forms the trio Azimuth, performing and recording three ECM albums between 1977 and 1980.

She also records with the American pianist Jimmy Rowles on Well Kept Secret in 1993.

Honours

Winstone receives the MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2007 for services to music.