Norma Winstone & Kit Downes: “Outpost of Dreams”

Last year, ECM celebrated the release of yet another gem in its catalogue. Outpost of Dreams was reviewed by the press worldwide as a true masterpiece, once again paying tribute to and honouring the extraordinary performer Norma Winstone. Norma is truly a piece of modern jazz history. She approached jazz by listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson on the radio, and in just a few years she became a true emblem of British jazz, her name long established in the pantheon of African-American music. There is no need to write about her talent and the beauty of her vocal introspection.

Alongside her is Kit Downes, one of the best English pianists of recent decades. All this makes for a truly enchanting evening of delicacy, grace, elegance, intimacy, light, total intensity and rich creativity. The octogenarian Norma Winstone and the young Kit Downes demonstrate that there is no generation gap in music, but rather that the singer's rich experience and the pianist's fresh creative vein trigger a creative mechanism in which the incessant and equal dialogue between the two is capable of generating only grace and evoking a place where dreams find a voice, a tangible human dimension.