Jazz Track Meet: On the Way to the Peak of Norma

It's time for the Saturday Evening post, the last one before we hit #500 for this page.

This one's a 42nd anniversary set, and it features two twin towers of the EuroJazz of the last century in scintillating collaboration.

It features Jazztrack, one of the many brainchildren of Sigi Busch, a formative figure of European fusion and improvised music of this last half century.

For this hour of power, he and his band find themselves in the company of Norma Winstone, whom I tributed a ways back on her 76th birthday, and who is one of my all-time favorite singers.

The music here is just percolating, with loose-yet-tight uptempo fusion grooves supporting the vocalist just soaring, swooping, scatting, duetting with the reeds, with the whole catalog of the Norma Winstone arsenal in full flight.

It's a little like if Norma joined Wolfgang Dauner's Et Cetera for a session, that's the closest I can get to describing this show in words.

Jazztrack & Norma Winstone
Lila Eule
Bremen, Germany
8.8.1977

01 radio intro
02 Plattermann
03 Mother Lou
04 Rugby
05 Backwoods Song

Total time: 54:50

Wolfgang Engstfeld - soprano & tenor saxophones
Christoph Spendel - electric piano
Sigi Busch - bass
Heinrich Hock - drums
Norma Winstone - vocals

indeterminate pre-FM sourced Nordwestradio broadcast
368 MB FLAC/June 2019 archive link

I haven't a shred of a clue where this one comes from, except to say that the spectral analysis shows it's a pre-broadcast thing and it sounds indistinguishable from an official release.

I'll be back tomorrow, I think, with the big 5-0-0 and a necessary tribute, via an amazing live document, to a fallen hero of the music of our epoch here.

That doesn't mean you should bypass this smokin' Jazztrack+1 set here, the only live document known to exist of this heady combination.--J.