Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler

Review by Ken Waxman

Diffident, self-effacing and circumspect are some of the clichés usually ascribed to Canadians’ personality. Yet these attributes easily describe trumpeter/composer Kenny Wheeler (1930-2014). Add to this indecision and public nervousness which had him use beta-blockers, these attributes added up to a symbolic disinclination to blow his own horn. Despite this, Wheeler was arguably the most significant jazz musicians to comer from Canada except for Oscar Peterson.

Chronicling the numerous strands of Wheeler’s musical life are Brian Shaw and Nick Smart, both trumpeters and academics. This 509 page volume including 2,039 (!) end notes, is built up from interviews with many of his associates from his early life in Ontario to his United Kingdom tenure from 1952 until his death.

Uncharacteristically brave for Wheeler who used money intended for music conservatory study for a ship’s passage to London, he arrived at the tail end of the big band era. Knowing no one he eventually lined up gigs, first recorded in 1955, and after moving through different bands and studio work established a relationship with Johnny Dankworth’s band as instrumentalist, arranger and composer. Praised for his compositional simplicity, major notice when he composed the Don Quixote inspired Windmill Tilter suite for John Dankworth’s big band. While he composed every day of his adult life for with a particular “time feel” and “melancholic melodies” (in his words); his scores were later interpreted internationally by professional and student band and his own groups he ruefully admitted he was never a bebop player like Tubby Hayes and others. Even in 2002 at a New York gig with Fred Hersch he left the stage rather than play a blues. “So fluent in his own music [he was] increasingly uncomfortable playing the music of others, especially so inside the bebop tradition,” the authors write. Of course this followed a lifetime of studio, radio and TV work where he played on commercials, so-called “light music for the BBC and backed everyone from James Last to Leo Sayer.

Strangely for an established professional Wheeler perfected his individual brass voice when the mid-1950s he became a regular participants in the small club gigs organized by younger players than himself part of London’s free music scene like Evan Parker and Dave Holland, who became lifelong friends. This new freedom led to a 1971 to 1976 tenure in Anthony Braxton’s quartet and most extended affiliations with the Globe Unity Orchestra and the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble.

Around this time he began recording for ECM in groups like Azimuth with Norma Winstone and John Taylor and finally under his own name and later hand-picked sidemen. He also taught at the Banff Centre for the Arts Jazz Workshop in Alberta from 1983 to 1998 mentoring yet another generation of North American and international improvisers. While his hearing and eyesight and mobility deteriorated as he aged he continued recording and gigging until shortly before his death.

While the authors mention nearly every Wheeler recording no matter how obscure and analyze what they hear as his exemplary playing in nearly every case as well as publishing encomiums from most musicians who came in contact with him, Song for Someone is not a panegyric. They report on the trumpeter’s frequent indecision, sometime innocence and especially in his last decades increasing crankiness. In a jazz context this led him to play some music he wasn’t comfortable with; having to share the publishing on “Everyone’s song but My Own” one of his classics by neglecting to carefully read a contract; a later in life affiliation with a manager who sometimes made getting gigs more difficult; bitterness towards sometime somewhat negative reviews of his performances by writers only doing their job; and overall a refusal to make tough decisions which at points hampered band personal and playing opportunities.

What Shaw and Smart have done through scholarship and research is create a jazz biography in a way that should be done by others attempting similar tasks.  Very likely it will remain the definitive work on Kenny Wheeler from now on.