KENNY WHEELER — Song for Someone (review)

KENNY WHEELER — Song for Someone album cover Album · 1973 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
Canadian trumpetist Wheeler is best-known for his stupendous Windmill Tilter solo album and his big-band works Music For Large ensembles, but in between those, one of his most notable works was another crowded band affair, the sometimes amazing Song For Someone. Including himself, Wheeler assembled for the album a 12-men horn section, but added two pianists, but also the beautiful Norma Winstone on some tracks. Looking at the names, one can see that despite the album being recorded in London, this is not the typical Collier-Carr crowd that would make the usual suspects, as only the Taylor-Winstone couple and maybe Osbourne (not the iron-ic idiot) are familiar names, at least to this writer. Apparently Wheeler had crossed path with Bransccombe and Horler when he played on Gonsalves’ Humming Bird album and pyne on Taylor’s Pause album. But this was exactly Wheeler’s idea: bring in musos from all walks of jazz to collaborate in a single orchestra.

Opening on the “all-out fire” 100 MPH and enthralling Toot, the album settles in a mid-tempo Ballad Two, where Norma Winstone toots a few scats at first, but disappears to let the horns take over, but the track veers into some disputable dissonant improves. Norma reappears for some celestial chants over very calm and subdued horns layers in the short title track. Taylor and Branscombe’s Rhodes open the 8-mins Causes Are Events, but this is an eclectic , but disjointed piece, where dissonant passages, scats, standard horn arrangements all clash into some kind of organized mayhem, where Wheeler’s trumpet emerges from the chaos alongside Norma’s wailings.

The only track that features a slightly different line-up (not really affecting the album’s sonic context, outside Bailey’s electric guitar touches) is the 15-mins+ Good Doctor who opens the flipside with some relatively-impenetrable free-form improves, then coming to a really slow-evolving crescendo that leads to a soothing flute passage (courtesy of Lamont) and later some Rhodes soundscape, before the big-band horns do speed up the tempo and fall back into dissonant improvs to finish in demented chaotic order. Norma comes back to head the group in a standard-sung jazz song (this is one, not a “piece”) Nothing Changes, as she could be Ella or Billie.

If you’re investigating Wheeler’s works in a chronological manner, this could be the perfect appetizer for his afore-mentioned Large Ensemble release. Not that this writer is a fan of the genre, but the era in which this album was released and its aesthetics do help this writer appreciate somewhat more than a Miller-type of big-band (for ex), even if he prefers Graham Collier’s attempts in that field.
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