I FIRST heard Kate Westbrook back in 1973, when she played tenor horn in her husband Mike’s brass band at the E1 Festival in Stepney, east London. Since those days she’s become an outstanding jazz vocalist and now in her 80th year she’s delivered the album Granite, perhaps her most singular achievement.

On a universal quest: Kate Westbrook

The record is a deeply poetic soliloquy about a Dartmoor quarry worker — “a granite creature who has neither gender or scale but memories and longings,” she tells me — searching for the song of his/her life, the song of the curlew.

Westbrook spent much of her childhood and schooling near Dartmoor and vividly remembers the curlew’s song but now there are only a few nesting pairs on that vast moor: “In Granite, I try to show the nobility of human endeavour and the paradoxical destruction of our planet.”

She found the spirit of the quarry worker — “flesh become stone,” she explains — in the rock and  her album evokes the abandoned quarry at Haytor and its past international links. “It bears traces of human labour, the vestiges of stone tracks where a horse-drawn cart carried granite loads to the river, then the cargo travelled by boat to the sea and out across the world.”

Thus her words and voice travel, joining with the song of the Blues which, Kate asserts, is “lifelong and universal. The Blues has no place for vanity. It is plugged into the eternal.”

As part of the recording, engineers Jay Auburn and Callum Godfroy carried a large speaker up to the quarry and played a swooping signal covering its complete sonic range and echo. Then Mike took her texts and added his “wonderful” themes and orchestration.

“His piano is a unique and rich voice that I have loved so profoundly through our 45 years of collaboration,” Kate says. “His music makes the seven-piece band sound intimate at times and massively orchestral at others.

“The violence of the climate and industrial action upon the landscape is conjured by the soundscape, as are the infinitesimally small noises of snowfall, bud-burst and wind-drift.”

It was important that all of the musicians of her Granite Band are south-west based and know Dartmoor. “It gives an added piquancy to our interpretations,” she says.

She pays tribute to the interaction and different interpretative approaches of guitarists Jesse Molins and Matthew North, while saxophonist Roz Harding is “a very gifted player, the brilliant drummer Coach York has a generous understanding of the music and texts and Bille Bottle on electric bass is an extraordinary multi-instrumentalist,”

Kate’s empathy with the quarry worker, “cutting, carting granite by day,” is profound as he/she searches for “the song I love across the moor/Across the granite Tor/ pray come the song I hold dear” to find “youth/ wisdom and the voice to carve out the Blues.”

Her own lifetime of singing reflects this eternal quest as if it were to find the song of her life too in all the clubs, cabarets and theatres of the world. A special life, as is Granite. Fusing labour and art, nature and beauty, the song and human will and aspiration, it holds a visceral warning and message to the future from the past and the present.

As Kate blew her horn in the summer of 1973 in Stepney, who knew then what struggles and menaces the next half century would bring and how she would express and illuminate them.

Granite is available on Westbrook Records, westbrookjazz.co.uk