Beth Gibbons Vinyl Records
An enigmatic yet intensely emotional musician, Beth Gibbons first gained renown as the voice of Portishead. The trio's acclaimed version of trip-hop drew on the vocal jazz and pop of the past while reinventing it radically, and Gibbons' vocals -- which recalled bygone greats such as Nina Simone and Edith Piaf -- were a perfect fit for the group's postmodern mystique. As a solo artist, Gibbons uses her elegant-yet-gritty contralto in a wide array of settings, from the chamber folk of Out of Season, her 2002 collaboration with Rustin Man, to her 2014 performance of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" with the the Polish National Radio Symphony.