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.

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.”