Beth Gibbons

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 Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" with the the Polish National Radio Symphony.

In between these releases, she scored films and worked with artists ranging from French pop legend Jane Birkin to the stoner rock band Gonga - projects with little in common other than Gibbons' unerring ability to connect with the emotional truth of any music of which she's a part.