Kenny Wheeler: Great Plans and Sudden Inspirations

If you want to name Canada’s most famous jazz musicians that’s easy - only Diana Krall and Oscar Peterson are likely to be considered “household names” outside their own households. But when it comes to less sensational categories like “influential,” “creative” or even “significant” - the few who have changed how other musicians think about music and how they put it together - the list looks different. The great arranger Gil Evans might be there, though his departure from Canada at the age of six months should add an asterisk. Montreal-born pianist Paul Bley should register for influencing pianists from Keith Jarrett to Brad Mehldau to play fewer and freer notes. Vying for the top of the list there’s Kenny Wheeler, a trumpeter and composer whose fresh and challenging work has influenced brass players and composers alike. No one more fully embodies the art of jazz than Wheeler, who has remained in touch with the roots and the edges of the music throughout his career and who has always been committed to improvisation and the spirits of change and possibility that it embodies.

Early background

Kenny Wheeler was born in Toronto on January 14, 1930 and grew up in Toronto and St. Catherines. His father Wilf was a trombonist and Kenny was regularly exposed to jazz trumpeters, first turning to Chicago-style players like Muggsy Spanier and Wild Bill Davison and then the swing masters like Buck Clayton and Roy Eldridge, all of whom impacted his youthful style. By 1950 he was beginning to hear bebop and listening to musicians like Fats Navarro and Miles Davis. He studied at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and was en route to Montreal’s McGill University for further studies when he decided to keep on going east to England.

In England he found a vigorous music scene, including a host of successful dance bands that could provide employment and a burgeoning bebop community - including pianist Stan Tracey and saxophonists Bobby Wellins and Tubby Hayes - that could provide inspiration. Throughout the 1950s, Wheeler worked with the dance bands of Roy Fox and Vic Lewis, eventually landing in Johnny Dankworth’s orchestra, the leading English jazz big band, in 1959.

Already an accomplished soloist in the bop idiom, Wheeler’s ears remained open to fresh possibilities. While you can find influences in Wheeler’s style of the most lyrical bop trumpeters, including Tony Fruscella and Art Farmer (like Farmer, Wheeler is more apt to turn to the flugelhorn, the trumpet’s mellow-toned rival), perhaps the last trumpet voice to contribute to his style was the brilliant young musician Booker Little, who died in 1961 at 23. Little’s compositions emphasized very close intervals, while his trumpet style was characterized by subtleties of intonation and surprising intervals, elements Wheeler would later commemorate in his A Little Suite.

London in the 60s enjoyed a music ferment as complex as any that had shaped the previous eras of jazz in America. The persistence of the big bands and a strong classical tradition contributed to a tremendous interest in third-stream music, the merger of jazz and classical elements and extended composition. At the same time the very rigours of the big bands symbolized a culture of constraint that was ready to explode in forms as different as the British rock movement, with its penchant for musical experimentation, and the distinctive form that free jazz was to assume as it became European Free Improvisation. 

It would be hard to find another musician who successfully bridged the worlds of British jazz in the 1960s and after as Kenny Wheeler did. A mature craftsman and an inspired improviser, Wheeler would never choose one style over another but managed to stand in the front-line of both extended composition and free improvisation, delivering solos of inspired creativity and illuminating whatever context he was playing in. The skills as both a section-player and a soloist made him a regular contributor to the ambitious orchestral projects of the day, appearing on composer Mike Westbrook’s Marching Song and Metropolis and Graham Collier’s Hoarded Dreams. On the other hand, he was playing and recording free jazz (and beyond) with drummer John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble. Karyobin, their early masterpiece, united Wheeler with younger figures in the British avant-garde, including saxophonist Evan Parker and bassist named Dave Holland, associations that have continued to the present. Wheeler even found occasion to try another direction, playing with saxophonist Joe Harriot and John Maher on their fusions of jazz and classical Indian music.

The Arrival

In 1968 Wheeler recorded his first LP as leader, one of the most ambitious debuts in jazz. Windmill Tilter: The Story of Don Quixote was an extended suite with Wheeler’s charts performed by the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra and a more intimate improvising group with the trumpeter supported by Holland and guitarist John McLaughlin. It was a brilliant debut for Wheeler, demonstrating both his talents for extended compositions and his distinctive trumpet style, and it also heralds the sudden creative explosion in British jazz. When Holland and McLaughlin left the country to join the Miles Davis band it would alert Britain and the world to the quality of the country’s musicians. 

Wheeler would soon take his rightful place on the international jazz scene. His big band projects stretched from work with Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson to membership in the radical Globe Unity Orchestra, while he also worked with a host of American expatriates that included Kenny Clarke, Philly Joe Jones and even Memphis Slim. He also recorded as a sidemen with musicians from Ellingtonian Paul Gonsalves and hard-bopper Pepper Adams to avant-garde figures like Lester Bowie, Don Cherry, and Leo Smith (all three, incidentally, trumpet players and especially likely to appreciate Wheeler’s talents).

The Presence

Wheeler has been a vital presence in some of the most creative groups in the world. In 1971 he first recorded with the American saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton, eventually becoming a regular member of the Braxton Quartet from 1974-76. It heralded another innovative style, one in which free improvisation combined at very high speed with written compositions of sometimes extraordinary complexity. Wheeler was a member of that very small group that could negotiate the music and still express his own creative voice within it. Then Wheeler spent the 1980s in another band of tremendous importance, the Dave Holland Quintet. If the Braxton band had emphasized innovation, the Holland quintet emphasized consolidation, exuberantly combining a strong sense of swing with tuneful elastic forms.

Along the way, Wheeler has created an extraordinary series of recordings, whether with small groups, orchestras or unusual permutations of the two. Following The Windmill Tilter, he recorded Song for Someone, which is typical of the way Wheeler would challenge himself as well as listeners, combining pieces for a conventional big band with hard-edged squiggling free improvisations from Evan Parker and guitarist Derek Bailey. In 1975 he began to record for the German ECM label, first releasing Gnu High, a quartet with label stalwart Keith Jarrett and Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette. It’s a brilliant introduction to Wheeler’s mature idiom. Within a smoothly lyrical style, Wheeler is a brilliantly spontaneous musical orator, developing conversational solos with both melodic continuity and sudden surprise the lyrical flow often stretched with low register asides, sudden, slightly querulous highs and muffled flurries, or else a moody meditation is suddenly shot through with a flash of brassy light. He is the consummate jazz trumpeter, never compromised by the instrument’s notorious difficulties or brass band leanings, but able to stretch its tone into a host of directions.  

Since Gnu High Wheeler has recorded regularly for ECM with small groups in a style that is distinctively contemporary, often moving from an edgy intensity with an inspired lyricism that ranges from the pensively introspective to the openly joyous. Along the way he’s worked with a continuous stream of the finest musicians fleshing out his striking compositions, like saxophonists Lee Konitz, Michael Brecker and Jan Garbarek and guitarists Bill Frisell and John Abercrombie. He’s also maintained a separate project, the luminous and understated Azimuth, a trio with singer Norma Winstone and pianist John Taylor which had its beginnings in 1977 and  has also produced a string of ECM recordings.

There’s been consistent recognition for Wheeler’s distinctive and varied big band writing, with jazz orchestras in numerous countries - including Italy, Finland, Austria and Sweden - featuring his work. Among his recordings, Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990) and A Long Time Ago, with a brass choir (1999), demonstrate the depth and originality of his compositions.

Canada and Jazz Education

Throughout the decades Wheeler has maintained a special relationship with Canada, as educator, visitor, and stylist. In the mid-80s when he was a member of the Dave Holland Quintet, the band became the core jazz faculty of the Banff School of Fine Arts, one of the key institutions for the development of first-rate jazz musicians in Canada. When Wheeler left the band he remained on the Banff faculty. With his partners in Azimuth, John Taylor and Norma Winstone, he’s developed a special relationship with the Maritime Jazz Orchestra, acting as guest soloists on their compositions. He has mentored young musicians like the pianist Jeff Johnston and Andrew Rathbun, appearing on their recordings as well as influencing their composing. Vancouver trombonist Hugh Fraser is another distinguished former student. He used to appear regularly at the Montreal Bistro, usually in the company of Don Thompson and Phil Dwyer, two more long-time associates, one a fellow teacher, the other a student from the Banff years. Among the many fine Canadian CDs, Wheeler has appeared on are Thompson’s Forgotten Memories, Rathbun’s Sculptures, and the Maritime Jazz Orchestra’s Siren’s Song and Here and Now. His recordings for Montreal’s Justin Time label include spontaneous get-togethers with Paul Bley and Sonny Greenwich. While he’s seen both as an icon and a frequent visitor for Canadian jazz, Wheeler has also lent it his distinctive orchestral voice, a fondness for richly shimmering, dark-hued brass textures and dense close-interval chords, a big band style that has some of the majesty of Hindemith, sometimes somber but always cut through with flashes of a brilliant light.   

Today Wheeler continues to record and travel prolifically. In 2003 he released the beautiful Dream Sequence, the culmination of sessions spread over eight years with some of his regular London partners, like John Taylor, the tenor saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, and guitarist John Parricelli. In 2005 The Italian Cam Jazz label released What Now? a commemoration of Wheeler’s 75th birthday with old friends Taylor and Dave Holland and the young saxophonist Chris Potter in a drummer-less quartet that received a Grammy nomination for Instrumental Jazz Album of the Year. 

No living musician has covered more of the jazz tradition than Wheeler, for there’s no musician of Wheeler’s generation who has been as deeply involved in the music’s most recent evolutions or who has challenged himself in so many ways.

Stuart Broomer writes regularly on jazz for Toronto Life, Musicworks, ParisTransatlantlic, Signal to Noise and amazon.com.