Norma Winstone, Klaus Gesing, Glauco Venier

Dance Without Answer is the third ECM album by the trio of British singer Norma Winstone, Italian pianist Glauco Venier and German reed player Klaus Gesing. It mixes new songs by Winstone and Gesing and by Venier with pieces by Nick Drake, Fred Neil and Tom Waits, film themes, a Madonna hit and a song from the Muppets. Voice, piano and bass clarinet or soprano saxophone give all of it one spare, coherent sound.

Venier and Gesing had worked together since the mid-1990s, including a long-running duo, and invited Winstone to join them for concerts. Their first trio album, Chamber Music, was recorded in 2002 for Universal in Austria, followed on ECM by Distances and Stories Yet To Tell. This one was recorded in December 2012 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Stefano Amerio engineered the session and Manfred Eicher produced it.

The title track began as a Gesing instrumental, Tanz ohne Antwort. Winstone translated the title and wrote words about incomplete goodbyes to match its bittersweet mood, and Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' closes the album with another farewell. For Gesing's High Places she wrote lyrics responding to the atmosphere of Denis Villeneuve's film Incendies, saying she tends to think visually when looking for words. Tom Waits' San Diego Serenade, a staple of their concerts and first recorded on Chamber Music, is a duet for voice and bass clarinet. Venier adds two Friulian pieces, among them a setting of a poem by Novella Cantarutti.

The sparse line-up leaves room for silences and for the shared improvising flexibility the three have built over the years. Gesing's bass clarinet moves between bass line and melody, while Venier's harmonisations give familiar tunes such as Live To Tell or Dave Grusin's It Might Be You a new frame. On All About Jazz a reviewer noted that "with band mates as sympathetic as Gesing and Venier, there's precious little she can't do." Writing in Jazz Weekly in April 2014, George W. Harris singled out the Waits song, with a "sepia toned Winstone dueting with Gesing's bass clarinet".

CD edition, ECM 2333, first released in January 2014.