Kenny Wheeler Legacy’s “Some Days are Better"

Jazz Album Review: Exactly on Time — Kenny Wheeler Legacy’s “Some Days are Better: The Lost Scores”

By Allen Michie

An excellent new album by the ad hoc ensemble Kenny Wheeler Legacy. It is impossible not to think of how the great trumpeter Kenny Wheeler would have sounded over these updated arrangements with such top-drawer musicians and excellent production.

Some Days are Better: The Lost Scores – Kenny Wheeler Legacy (Greenleaf Music)

Jazz is great at tribute albums. Jazz musicians seem to relish putting them together and playing on them, and they have often produced masterpieces of both conception and playing (my favorite is producer Hal Wilner’s Thelonius Monk tribute album That’s the Way I Feel Now). It’s a happy side-effect of the heightened historical awareness jazz musicians tend to exhibit. It’s a way of paying tribute, of course, but perhaps at times it’s also a way to finally deal with the anxiety of influence and begin definitively moving on with your own voice and style. (Ask anyone who’s played with the rhythm section of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams.)

There’s a melancholy undercurrent to these brilliant retrospectives, however, especially when the honoree has recently passed away. If only…if only…this could have been done a few years earlier while the subject of honor was still here to appreciate it, and perhaps play on it. The tribute to Ornette Coleman at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in June 2014 got it exactly right. The star-studded affair was Coleman’s final performance. More often, however, as with the Jaco Pastorius tributes that came out shortly after his death, it’s heart-wrenching to think of how these kinds of high-profile gigs could have made a difference during the honoree’s final years of suffering or obscurity.

Listening to the excellent new album Some Days are Better: The Lost Scores by the ad hoc ensemble Kenny Wheeler Legacy, it’s impossible not to think of how the great trumpeter Kenny Wheeler would have sounded over these updated arrangements with such top-drawer musicians and excellent production. Wheeler, who died in 2014, is undergoing a resurgence of well-deserved recognition. His burnished tone and nimble improvisations made him a first-call session player and bandmate for musicians as diverse as John Dankworth, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland, Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, and innumerable commercial sessions for the BBC and others. Wheeler is now the subject of a full-length biography, Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler by Nick Smart, who adapted his research for the substantive liner notes for this simultaneously released album.

Smart discovered the masterful arrangements on Some Days are Better in the attic of the Wheeler family home. Wheeler performed these arrangements just once each, on a series of annual BBC broadcasts called “Jazz Workshop,” between 1969 and 1973. Wheeler said of these BBC broadcasts, “It’s a bit of a labour of love—because you have to write everything yourself for basically nothing, and copy it, and ring up all the musicians. But it’s still worth it in the end…I think.” Message to Kenny in the next world: It was.

Smart knew gold when he saw it, so he put together this lovingly detailed recording of the arrangements and makes a persuasive case for their importance:

You cannot understand his later (and much better known) music without re-walking the steps from where it all started. Nor can you, without looking at this period of his life, understand why he made the choices he made and what the elements were that remained in his later writing. And you certainly cannot understand just how profound and human his legacy is, and the example he left for us, without digging into these compositions.

More specifically, Smart’s liner notes offer the three-ingredient recipe for describing and appreciating this music. “His activities in this period span commercial session and freelance work, ‘conventional’ jazz playing (as he called it), and the free improvisation scene. These three things go on to shape his unique compositional approach, and once again, his journey demonstrates that it was the triumvirate of skills that defined his musical evolution and set him apart from his peers.”

What makes these arrangements so unpredictable and compelling is the way Wheeler integrated these three typically incompatible elements. “The same three elements—studio, jazz, and free—are also equally in balance within his compositions,” writes Smart. Sections of free playing often appear as introductions, interludes, or counterpart dialogues. They expand the vision of the music, and they are never there just to be hip or ironic. Charles Mingus could pull this off (“Sue’s Changes”), Don Pullen (who played with Mingus) could do it, Carla Bley (Escalator Over the Hill) could do it, and clearly Kenny Wheeler could do it.

“D.G.S.,” for example, features Brian Lynch on flugelhorn, Eric Law on alto, and Josh Beck piano. There is a free opening section, brewing the raw material of the composition that could grow in any direction. Bouncing, angular melodies bubble up into the main theme. Law captures the spirit of the song, leaving Ornette Coleman for Cannonball Adderley in his solo. Lynch contributes a fluid bop solo, as you would expect, then the piece is allowed to slowly and thoughtfully dissolve into free jazz with the rhythm section. It comes to almost a complete halt before it goes back into time for the melody to repeat and close out. Minute by minute, there are brave and effective choices, and the whole thing somehow hangs together beautifully.

Other pieces gracefully combine ambitious arranging with a lighter commercial touch. “Song for Someone” has Maria Quintanilla on wordless vocals, singing a somewhat ghostly minor-key melody. It begins as a slow piece with lots of low brass, something Sketches of Spain-era Gil Evans would enjoy. Then there’s an unexpected shift to a swinging trombone solo with assertive interjections from the big band. It’s followed by the more commercial sound of an electric piano solo, which sounds perfectly right when it appears — it’s smoother, yes, but it’s another tone color, and a bright one right where the sound painting needed it.

“Everybody Knows It” is a complex one, and I dare some of the excellent college bands out there to take this one on. There are juxtaposed time signatures on the main theme. The wordless vocals blend seamlessly into the big band sound and structure, like another reed. This adds a soulfulness and flexibility to what, in other hands, could have been just another commercial flashy big band chart. After a dynamic alto solo from Law, the bass temporarily shifts into double time, then it dissolves into a free section briefly before stacking up again into the groove of the full band.

There’s another fast and conventional big band chart, “C.P.E.P.,” that you can imagine Buddy Rich’s commercial band tearing into. Trombonist Sam Keedy plays a fine, swinging solo, then the chart begins gradually sliding off the rails. After a big band section interlude, the drums get very loose, and the same trombonist shows his free jazz chops. It’s the same tone and the same feel, but in a completely different style. Keedy plays a simple riff that gets taken up by the whole band (I’m not sure if this is written or improvised — my guess would be improvised, like the old “head arrangements” of the Kansas-City era Count Basie band), then it collapses again into a free section. Evan Parker, the long-time Wheeler colleague and reigning British monarch of free jazz saxophone, duets with Jacob Smith on drums (who equips himself admirably throughout this entire extremely demanding album). Wheeler concludes with a big dramatic (maybe melodramatic) finish. “C.P.E.P.” stands out as a delightful chart that’s always building on what came right before and setting up unpredictable vistas just ahead.

Kenny Wheeler at Montreux, 1975. Photo credit: Harry Monty.

Each of the 11 tracks has similar kaleidoscopic elements that will appeal at some level, and at some time or another, to most every jazz lover (alas, no trad jazz, but Wheeler had experience playing that, too). But a few words about the players. Just like Duke Ellington, Wheeler often built his arrangements around the tones, styles, and personalities of his players. That choice of players was in turn guided by Wheeler’s own friendly and non-confrontational personality. As pianist John Taylor puts it, “I often had the idea that the reason he used on certain times, two piano players or extra soloists in the saxophone section or whatever, he’d have two simply because he didn’t want to tell one not to come and do it!. . . I’m not sure that was always brought on by musical reasons.” Wheeler himself said, “I thought I would like to have all my people I work with, and favourite people, in the band no matter what — whether they’re Dixieland, free players or what they are. . . . I thought I better have some of the studio guys just for intonation and playing things right. . . so that’s how that funny band [came to be].”

Some Days are Better locates two of the musicians from the original BBC broadcasts, vocalist Norma Winstone and saxophonist Evan Parker. Otherwise, the album was put together across a number of different recording sessions involving different sets of players, some from England’s Royal Academy of Music Jazz Orchestra (conducted by Smart) and some from the University of Miami’s Frost Jazz Orchestra (conducted by John Daversa). True to the nature of Wheeler’s arrangements, a string of guest soloists make key contributions, including Shelly Berg on piano, Etienne Charles on flugelhorn, Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, Brian Lynch on trumpet, Evan Parker on sax, Chris Potter on tenor, and James Copus on flugelhorn. (Where’s the Greenleaf label’s executive producer Dave Douglas? He would have fit right in here with his ecumenical trumpet.)

There’s not a bad solo anywhere on this record, but to my ear, some of the session players outshine the guest stars. Bassist Niklas Lukassen bravely mixes it up with Evan Parker on “Some Days are Better Suite,” and he steers the ensembles with confidence and sophistication throughout all the swinging, commercial, and free sections of these notoriously knotty charts. Saxophonist Emma Rawicz offers strong solos on tenor, keeping in the groove but exploring her space on “Some Doors are Better Open” and “Some Days are Better Suite.” Smart is a fine flugelhorn player who, surprise surprise, shows a strong Kenny Wheeler influence. Eric Law can take it to the edge and bring it back down to earth on alto (making him perfect for these kinds of charts). Conductor John Daversa takes trumpet solos as well, playing brilliantly on “Introduction to No Particular Song” and “Everybody Knows It.” Keep an eye out for all these names.

Wheeler said that his revolving and evolving big band was “slightly in the middle…again, to put labels on it, the ‘free jazz’ people would say it’s ‘too far in’ and then ‘in’ people would say it’s ‘too far out’.” This is music that evaporated through the airways from 1969-73 and has somehow found its way back to us today, exactly on time.

from https://artsfuse.org