Exploring Kenny Wheeler's legacy

To find out the background to the new Greenleaf release, Some Days Are Better: The Lost Scores, from the Kenny Wheeler Legacy project, I spoke to trumpeter Nick Smart who curated the project, but who is also head of jazz at the Royal Academy of Music.

I wanted to know how it came about that the musicians on the record are principally a big band drawn from Academy students and their academic counterparts from Florida in the United States.

The Americans are from the Frost School of Music, situated in the Coral Gables area of Miami. From 1926 until 2003 it was known as the University of Miami School of Music, but after a benefaction of $33 million from the philanthropists Philip and Patricia Frost, it changed its name accordingly. From its early days, this was one of the few US conservatoires with jazz as part of its curriculum, and alumni include Carmen Lundy, Hiram Bullock and Bobby Watson, while such world-renowned musicians as Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius have (over the years) taught, lectured or run workshops there. It remains a target destination for students from other parts of the world who want to study jazz.

Full cast of Frost Academy and Royal Academy students plus Norma Winstone and Evan Parker

Nick Smart says: “We’ve had a relationship with Frost, with students spending an exchange year or semester there, since about 2010. Trombonist, composer and arranger Patrick Hayes was our first student to go over there, and there have been many more since. Likewise we’ve welcomed Frost students to London over the years. So having got this exchange system in place, trumpeter John Daversa, who chairs the jazz faculty there, and I hatched a plan to put together a big band, comprising students from both academies, to play some of Kenny Wheeler’s unrecorded music.

"The idea initially came from Kenny’s old colleague Dave Holland, who was a visiting professor at Frost, alongside me, in January 2018, when we played through some of Kenny’s music. Once John knew that all the Wheeler archive was at the Royal Academy of Music, including many excellent but unrecorded pieces, the project to explore this treasure trove started to develop.

"It was going to happen before the Covid pandemic took hold. The whole thing had been booked. Abbey Road studios were reserved for June 2020. We’d run a whole series of online auditions and selected the personnel, and so we were quite traumatised when the restrictions on travel and non-essential contact suddenly came in during mid-March.

“We picked up the threads again in 2023, because we reckoned, not least because we now had an intake of new students, that we needed another year’s preparation. So in the lead-up to our second attempt, John Daversa came over to London and met all the Academy jazz students in November 2023.

"Then in January 2024 I went to Frost, and we played through the music we planned to record, so that the American students had a sense of what it was all about. Following that, we created an amalgam of the two bands to do the actual recording. So we brought our chosen Frost musicians to join us in the studio here, along with some more mature and established musicians.”

I noticed that Ingrid Jensen, who plays a featured trumpet solo on the opening track ‘Smatta’, is credited as being recorded in the United States. How did that work?

“Ingrid has been our visiting professor of jazz at the Royal Academy, so we wanted to involve her. But because of her busy touring schedule, she had to be recorded on the other side of the Atlantic, and her solo was overdubbed onto the Abbey Road recording. And the same applies to some of the other guest soloists, tenorist Chris Potter, flugelhorn player Brian Lynch and trumpeter Etienne Charles. But everyone else was in the studio at the same time, including, for example, pianist Shelly Berg (the Dean of Frost School), who we were glad to have there in in person.”

Then I asked Nick what the biggest musical challenge had been in creating such an atmospheric album. The ‘Some Days Are Better Suite’ itself evoked particular memories of Kenny’s bands for me. This was not least because of the contributions of Norma Winstone and Evan Parker, both of whom I had heard playing in some of Kenny’s large ensembles, but also the overall feel of the band.

“I think that’s because whatever instrument you play, every seat in the band is there because of the person in that seat who Kenny was writing for. In that sense it’s almost Ellingtonian. It’s not just ‘trombone 1’ or ‘drummer’, in Kenny’s mind it was ‘Chris Pyne’ or ‘Tony Oxley’ – so to try and get today’s players to bring something of their own to catch the spirit of the music was as important as the notes on the page.”

I was interested how atmospherically not just Norma, but also the young singer Immy Churchill, had caught the nuances of adding a female vocal line to the collective ensembles. It’s something I remember first hearing Norma doing very effectively with Kenny at the old Vortex in Stoke Newington, well over 30 years ago.

“These are the types of things that matter in this music,"says Nick. "The written charts aren’t particularly technically difficult. They’re not crazily fast or ridiculously rhythmically complex. It was the spirit that mattered to us, and the individual contributions that we were hoping to catch. Trumpeter James Copus, for example, stands out. He’s an extraordinary talent on the trumpet for this country, really one of the best, and he’s featured on Kenny’s ‘Dallab’, (which is ‘Ballad backwards).

"But then Etienne Charles is also brilliant, and although he overdubbed his ‘Some Doors’ solo on the record, he was actually in London during rehearsals, and spent time with the band at the Vortex. We did two warm-up gigs ahead of Abbey Road, one for the Junior Academy students one Saturday, and after more rehearsals on the Sunday, we played the Vortex on the Monday night, before starting the next day in the studio. So we’d worked through the music on live gigs before starting to record, and even though Etienne couldn’t be with us for the actual sessions, he had captured the vibe of it, and I think –listening back – you’d never know he was overdubbing. I think those two players, James and Etienne, show what a big part of contemporary trumpet DNA Kenny Wheeler is, not just here in Britain, but internationally.”

Having talked a bit about the musicians on the record, I thought Nick might be able to give Jazzwise readers a bit of background on the extraordinary wealth of material in the Kenny Wheeler archive, from which the music here was drawn.

“The archive’s now at the Royal Academy of Music, but we didn’t really know all of what was there until it was agreed it would come to the Academy. When it was, I went to Kenny’s house with the Academy librarian and a couple of students in a rented van. We went up to that attic where he kept all the music. He hadn’t forgotten about it, but there was just a lot of it that he’d stored up there. We basically emptied out the whole lot. It was in a collection of suitcases and plastic bags, because he had no filing system. But he’d just store it there after it had been used.

"That said, I think there’s quite a bit of his music missing, because Kenny was so generous with his material, he’d just give things to people, even if they were the originals. I’ve heard countless stories of people who asked Kenny to send them something, and they got sent his pencil copy. But that aside, we took everything that was left.

“Now at that point I was already researching Kenny’s biography that I’ve written with Brian Shaw. And I was particularly interested in the period when Kenny was first getting his own band together. And I realised that all the tune titles I saw listed in the BBC archives from his early broadcasts were pieces that we’d actually got the arrangements for. So to play some of them, we put a band together at the Academy for the ECM 50th anniversary and what would have been Kenny’s 90th birthday in January 2020, as a precursor of our plans to record in June that year, but as I’ve said, then Covid happened, and the project stalled. But collating those charts from Kenny’s earliest bands made me realise that this was a collection of his material that never found a life to be performed later on. This was partly because the line-up was unusual.

"But then he moved away from that, because as his career took off from the mid-1970s, he started being invited into other big bands as a guest, and had to normalise the line up. So most of this music never got played again. Even most of the ensembles that were put together for his birthday concerts in the UK were generally standard big bands, with him and Norma added. Although, that said, the 70th birthday was with a 12-piece band.

“Of course, some of the essence of this early work remained into his later period, but if you take these early pieces themselves, they truly are unlike anything else in his later catalogue. I think they’re also important, because they’re almost the only part of his work he spoke of with such commitment and confidence. As you know, Alyn, from interviewing him yourself, he was usually reticent and you’d never hear him saying ‘I knew I had something!’ or ‘No-one else is doing this.’ But he did say that about this era of his writing and bandleading. I also mention in the notes to the album that he said that this was ‘too far in’ for the ‘free jazz people’ and ‘too far out’ for many others.”

I suggest to Nick that in some ways Kenny in this period lost out to other innovators of that crossover period from the 1960s to the 70s when these pieces were written, including Mike Westbrook, or John Surman, or Ian Carr, because his band wasn’t commercially recorded and seldom did gigs.

“That’s right, In fact I discovered that Kenny’s band only played live three times during those years in what was about an eight year period from 1969. Most of the pieces were written for and played on what turned out to be an almost annual BBC Radio session. But the thing that was most genuinely moving about making this album was to see all these young musicians from both sides of the Atlantic, playing it and just loving it! There was no sense of this being ‘old fashioned’ or ‘historical’ and they were all enthused and ignited by this very special music.”

As well as the Kenny Wheeler Legacy album project there’s a much anticipated book, Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler, co-authored by fellow horn players and jazz educators Nick Smart and Brian Shaw. Mike Flynn spoke to them about the connections between these two epic projects and how Wheeler shaped UK and European jazz…

How did you divide up/collaborate on the research?

Brian Shaw: We divided the book up by chapters. I would take the lead on a chapter, and Nick took the lead on another, etc., until we had it all divided. We have a Dropbox folder containing tons of articles, reviews, over 130 interviews we conducted, and a massive document of events throughout Kenny’s life (musical and personal); we used that to make sure we didn’t overlook anything important. We weren’t rigid about the division of labour. When there was an area that one of us knew more about, they would lead the writing and we’d weave that into what the other had already written about that period.

Nick Smart: I also think in a funny way the fact we’d never done this before helped because our naivety, and passion for the project, meant we didn’t know when to stop when it came to the research and interviews… it was all so interesting we just kept going!

And who wrote the finished text, as it reads as a single author (which is good for the reader)?

NS: Thanks! And honestly, we both did it. I think the secret was that we really heavily edited each other’s chapters so it kind of unified the overall tone of the voice across the whole book – and more importantly, we managed to do that on each other’s work without having any arguments… or at least, none that were too serious!

BS: Also, candidly, I think our relative newness to being authors helped fuel our ignorance of how challenging writing a book together could be!

Kenny was unique in the way he could work between three distinct areas – commercial arranging/composing, free improvisation and as a virtuosic soloist – how did these elements feed into his composing style?

BS: These disparate areas definitely unified his style. He was such a great improviser over changes, and his solos served his compositions, which, if you analyse them, are so detailed – that the looseness of his time feel helped 'breathe' a human element into them. And his highly organised compositions gave his improvisations (especially the more chaotic 'free' bits) some structure that made them more aesthetically satisfying. His commercial background led him to use friends from his session work who could play beautifully in tune which provided a counterweight for the more 'creative' players who were there because Kenny wanted them as improvisors even though they had more 'diverse' opinions on pitch and tone colour.

NS: I agree, and it was something Kenny himself actually said so clearly on the back sleeve of the Song For Someone LP in 1973: “The idea of this band was to try to get special musicians from and into different areas of jazz to play together and to try to write music especially for them. That is, the thought of these musicians came first and then the music”.

What defines Kenny’s highly personal sound – both as a trumpeter and composer?

BS: First, as a trumpet player, I think his sound was a result of him being self-taught and starting out life playing with an 'open' sort of embouchure. He played in a way that made his tone sound burnished, with lots of overtones in it, which our ears are just naturally attracted to. To me, his tone sounds more like a classical trumpeter, even though the other elements were so unique.

NS: He had a vulnerability too, alongside all that virtuosity, which made him so expressive and endearing - it was relatable, somehow.

BS: Compositionally, his music is just so precise and mathematical. It’s almost Mozartian in the way that the melodies sound inevitable, as if they already existed and Kenny just 'found' them. And his orchestration - especially the use of his flugel with Norma’s voice in unisons that sounded like a new instrument. Kenny’s ‘Consolation’ from his ‘Sweet Time Suite’ is almost like Ravel’s Bolero in showcasing the same melody in constantly changing orchestrations. And he wrote often using counterpoint. Who does this in jazz? Yes, a few, but none of them did so with Kenny’s Bach-like precision.

The release of Some Days are Better: The Lost Scores does provide a fitting soundtrack to the book – albeit a separate project – but it’s wonderful to hear the richness of the scores contrasted with some free improv sections where Evan Parker lets loose. Does this go back to Kenny’s desire to combine the contrasting personalities of the musicians first and then create music around them – to initiate these fresh musical outcomes?

NS: Yes, exactly as I mentioned before in Kenny’s own quote about the personalities coming first, and the music following
on to provide a fitting context and home for them. It was really to do with the musical scenes in which Kenny felt he was welcomed and where he had friends, he then wanted to have a band with all of them in - and Evan was a huge part of that. Norma too, of course.

Do you think it was the combination of Kenny’s unique personality and his technical command of playing/composing that ultimately shaped his sound and in turn his legacy?

NS: I couldn’t have put it better. As a musician, and that includes his playing, improvising and composing, he was a completely honest and unforced embodiment of all that he was as a person. It is really exactly as Dave Holland said in one of our many interviews: “who he was - as a person - was embodied in the music in a certain way, which is the highest form of artistry.”

Song For Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler gets its live launch on 6 March in the Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London