Somewhere Called Home is the first ECM album under the name of British singer Norma Winstone, and a milestone in her career. After nearly ten years with the trio Azimuth, she recorded this set of songs with pianist John Taylor and reedman Tony Coe. She strips standards to their emotional core and adds her own words to melodies by Egberto Gismonti, Ralph Towner, Kenny Wheeler and Bill Evans.

Winstone, born in London in 1941, had been a member of Azimuth with Taylor and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, a group that recorded for ECM from 1977. Taylor was also her husband at the time. Coe plays clarinet and tenor saxophone, and there is no bass or drums. The album was recorded in July 1986 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher, and released in 1987.

The repertoire runs from the jazz songbook to the music of fellow ECM artists. Café, a Gismonti melody with Winstone's lyric, opens the album over Taylor's gentle piano and Coe's reeds. The title song, written by Pat Smythe with words by Fran Landesman, turns on loneliness and longing. In Towner's Celeste Coe's tenor takes the lead, and Wheeler's Sea Lady and Evans's Prologue also carry new lyrics by the singer. Among the standards are Arlen and Mercer's Out of This World and Tea for Two, which closes the album with Coe's tenor.

In a 2010 review of a later Winstone record for The Jazz Mann, Ian Mann called this "a beautiful album". He added that it "can be said to have sown the seeds" for her trio with Glauco Venier and Klaus Gesing. For Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews, writing in 2012, it is "a profound, meditative masterpiece that will grow as you do". Winstone was made an MBE in 2007, and in 2015 the Parliamentary Jazz Awards named her Jazz Vocalist of the Year.

This CD belongs to ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the label's back catalogue back into print, here in a gatefold card sleeve. ECM 1337, first released in 1987, this edition 2008.