(Portions of the following have appeared in or been paraphrased from Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler by Brian Shaw and Nick Smart, published by Equinox Books, 2025)

Kenny Wheeler’s sound – both as a trumpet/flugelhorn player and as a composer – is instantly recognizable. Such a musical fingerprint is, of course, one of the most desirable and elusive characteristics of any great jazz artist. Kenny’s set of skills, at the pinnacle of artistry and technique, defined his musical evolution and set him apart from his peers. Perhaps only the likes of Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter, or Thelonious Monk could be considered in this extreme level of multi-genre versatile excellence in the history of jazz, being at once as identifiable as virtuoso instrumentalists, improvisors, and composers.

Before we even consider his melodic writing, Kenny could be seen as a groundbreaking jazz composer in terms of orchestration alone. His mid- to late-period big band writing featured his solo flugelhorn with a wordless voice, usually that of the peerless Norma Winstone. Kenny’s longtime trumpet colleague Henry Lowther called the effect of Kenny and Norma together being like “British music that I’ve always known… that sound . . . is something unique, something very precious.” Kenny regularly used a wordless voice as another instrument in his ensembles dating all the way back to his 1970 broadcast for the BBC (and most notably, his 1973 Incus album Song for Someone). But his predilection for an unusual instrumentation had come from the “band within a band” concept he’d experienced playing in the 1960s with the John Dankworth Orchestra. He was experimenting with varying front lines of flugelhorn, voice, a saxophone or two, and sometimes a trombone in place of the traditional 5-member (AATTB) saxophone section. But as Kenny’s music became more popular in Europe in the late 1970s and early 80s, he needed to make his music more easily playable by standard big bands, so this eventually evolved into simply him and Norma out front of a conventional big band setup. The orchestrational combination of flugelhorn, wordless voice, guitar and/or saxophone in unison presenting Kenny’s beautiful melodies – almost like Ravel’s Bolero in how they seemingly coalesce to create a new instrument – is oftentimes as recognizable as his unique harmonic language.

Although he often said in interviews “I must have a system but really don’t want to know what it is”, it is wrong to assume that Kenny wasn’t methodical in his compositional process. Kenny was so paralyzed by anxiety at having to speak in front of large groups that he would write his entire presentation out longhand the night before and read it verbatim to the audience. In this case, we are the beneficiaries of Kenny’s suffering, as many of these manuscripts survive as a record of a process he would never have described otherwise. These notes for composition lectures he gave when in residency at Canada’s Banff Centre for the Arts or other educational institutions around the world show a great deal of thoughtful harmonic, melodic, and structural consideration. And if a student or friend asked for a copy of one of his tunes, he never failed to share a manuscript – sometimes even written out by hand for that particular person.

Despite this generosity, Kenny could be deflective or even evasive when asked more specific questions about his compositional process. “I’ll leave that to you, Mr. Detective!” he might reply, never revealing much further. For students of his music, this elusiveness can be maddening – but it provides an opportunity to take what we know about his fascinating life (something Nick Smart and I have learned a great deal about while writing his biography, Song for Someone over these last ten years) and apply it to what we know about his compositions.

For example, in later life Kenny would often describe his music as being a balance of a “pretty” or “melancholy” tune, mixed in with an element of “chaos”. Events from his early life go a long way towards explaining why he felt most comfortable with this otherwise counterintuitive juxtaposition. Kenny’s childhood was difficult; he was the middle of seven children born within 10 years of each other, moving from city to city in Canada’s post-Depression economy, his hardworking and dutiful father continually seeking out steady employment (and playing music semi-professionally) while his fun-loving mother became increasingly erratic and sank further and further into alcoholism, occasionally leaving the family for weeks at a time. In a situation in which other fathers might have given their young children up to foster care, Wilf Wheeler, strong in his Catholic faith, kept the family together. The remaining older siblings looked after the younger ones as best they could while their father worked. Faced with isolation at school from his chronic shyness and loneliness from his mother’s frequent absence, Kenny found his greatest solace in the music that was quickly becoming the preoccupation of his inner world.

These dualities manifest themselves in his music. The precise, organized nature of his father was ever-present in Kenny’s compositions, created with Mozartian clarity, almost mathematical – even inevitable – in their structure. And the chaotic element from his mother, of course, was most clearly expressed in the free music he discovered in the mid-sixties, which he often credited for opening himself up as not only a player but as a writer as well. He would often write his friends from the London free jazz scene into the music in part to basically destroy his “pretty tunes”, having the artistic intuition to know that too much beauty, order, and melancholy needed to be balanced by something more anarchic and spontaneous.

Kenny was a lifelong learner, constantly seeking instruction on both the trumpet and in composition. Once he finished high school, he spent around six months studying in Toronto at the Royal Conservatory of Music. There, he pursued composition lessons with John Weinzweig, one of the leading figures in serialism in Canada. (Weinzweig used Paul Hindemith’s 1943 A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony as his textbook.) A dozen years after he moved to London, Kenny also studied composition with Richard Rodney Bennett, with whom he also mainly focused on serial techniques. (Bennett himself had spent two years in Paris studying with Pierre Boulez.) But it was the disciplined study of counterpoint with Bill Russo that would prove most useful for Kenny. “Studying counterpoint, baroque counterpoint, was great for me,” he said. “It loosened me up as a player and a writer I think, just to see the way melodies work against each other and stuff like that, you know… that’s why my writing chops were getting so good . . .” Years later, Dave Holland and John Abercrombie both recalled Kenny doing compositional exercises during their long travel days on tour. “He would say he was going to study formal counterpoint, with the cantus firmus and all that, and he would sit on the train for hours working that stuff out,” Dave said. “It was just a sign of that thing that Kenny had, which was to constantly be reaching for the next thing and trying to improve.” He even once registered for a correspondence course in advanced algebra to sharpen his mind for writing.

Kenny also had an interesting – and seemingly formative – experience in 1974 at the Proms performing “Les Moutons de Panurge” by composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski. The piece has an interesting mathematical structure. Saxophonist Evan Parker described the additive (and subtractive) nature of the piece as “A 65 note melody played in the form 1, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4 [and so on until you get to] . . . 65” , at which point the players play the whole line, then repeat the process in reverse playing from “2 . . . 65, 3 . . . 65 . . . [and so on to the last note].” Once that cycle is complete, the players are to hold the last note until everybody has caught up, and then begin a spontaneous improvisation together, hence the use of these leading free players in the performance. The angular nature of the melody and the complexity of the counting means it is deliberately very difficult for the players to maintain the unison throughout, so Rzewski gives a very “jazz-like” instruction: “If you get lost, stay lost!” Kenny recalled playing the piece himself: “ . . . the problems he posed were really absorbing, like the piece where you had to play [65 notes] straight, and then play them backwards. But I don’t compose music like that . . .”

This last statement may not be strictly true. Kenny does, in fact, in at least three notable compositions, utilize exactly this kind of additive, or “developing variation” technique. On the third part of his Heyoke suite (from his 1975 album Gnu High), the tune “W.W.” (from 1983’s Double, Double You), and most poignantly, the “Opening” chorale of The Sweet Time Suite from the 1990 release Music for Large and Small Ensembles, he uses a modified version of this device to wonderful effect. Whether or not it was the direct influence of this encounter with Rzewski’s music, or more broadly as a result of his formal composition study, we don’t know – but he certainly embraced the technique and made it his own on more than one occasion.

 

 

 

 

Anyone who is familiar with Kenny’s tunes also knows that he also had an affinity for wordplay. He named his tune “Kayak” because he liked palindromes, and there are numerous examples of witty Wheeler titles including “The Widow in the Window”, The Sweet Time Suite, “Know Where You Are”, etc. Also, the titles “Enowena” and “Dallab” are just “A New One” and “Ballad” backwards, respectively. He also had a peculiar interest in naming tunes after animals (Gnu High, “The Mouse in the Dairy”, “Foxy Trot”). In one of the most convoluted examples of his interest in wordplay, Kenny wrote “Aspire” as a tribute to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Kenny said, “He was aspiring to play again because he had a stroke and I really liked him a lot.” Also, he explained, “Kirk” was similar to the German word Kirche, meaning church, and churches have a spire. Clearly, this sort of thing was something he thought about deeply.

But why go into all of this seemingly trivial “pun”-ditry? I believe that some of Kenny’s melodic and harmonic language grew out of this love of wordplay and through creating musical shapes in a different way. The massive volume of scores in the Kenny Wheeler Archive attest to the fact that he wrote something nearly every day of his life – which I would argue necessitated that he search for new and perhaps unorthodox ways to generate material, or at least germinate the seed of something he could begin to work with. Early every morning at around 5 or 6 A.M., he started at the piano, waking up his mind by playing some Bach chorales, then setting pencil to paper for hours once something came to mind. And given his interest in mathematics and word puzzles, there’s no reason to think he couldn’t have used such elements to at least ignite some sort of creative musical spark. Having studied composition formally, he also likely would have been aware of Bach and Shostakovich’s use of cryptograms (Bach using the German musical spelling of his name [BACH = B-flat – A – C – B-natural] or Shostakovich’s use of the same device [DSCH = D – E-flat – C – B-natural]) in their compositions. So why not use such techniques to generate his own music?

I’m not claiming this was in every composition, but rather that it might have just been a tool he used for inspiration, especially when he was writing tunes for specific people. Kenny’s large family provided him a blessing and a curse when dedicating his tunes: “When you begin writing pieces for members of your family, you find that you then have to write pieces for everyone in the family, or some members of your family will be angry with you,” he said. Sometimes this approach might not have yielded anything he found useful, of course, but here is a possible example of where he might have used it to get started.

Kenny wrote “Sophie” for his granddaughter. (He wrote tunes for his entire family.) In a lecture notebook entry, he wrote: “…as far as the melody goes, I make (in SOPHIE) a lot of use of the little mi. 3rd phrase Db, C, Bb throughout the piece in different pitches…” So, obviously, this set of intervals was significant to him on this tune. If you look at the name “Sophie” and transform it in solfege fixed do to “So(l)-Fi-E”, it becomes G-F#-E, which is the same set of intervals (transposed) Kenny mentioned in his lecture notes, and precisely the intervals at the beginning of the melody. Also, if you set the melody to “Sophie” in that key (so that the first note is G) the first chord before the downbeat would be G/F# (“Sol/Fi” = Sophie). By my count, there are at least seven examples of this form of the cell in the first half of the melody (min. 2, maj 2 – red circle), three examples of it in inversion (maj. 2, min. 2 – blue circle), and four examples of it in a different order (min. 3, min. or maj. 2 – green circle). This motive is also implied in the roots of the bass line in several places. Finally, when Kenny restates the first half of the melody to create the second half of the tune (as he did often) – you guessed it – it goes up a minor third.

 

An example of this in a harmonic setting can be found in the bass line of his tune about baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams (“For P.A.”) from the Sweet Time Suite, where the harmony at the beginning of the tune begins: A/Bb – Dmin, then Eb min/F. If you break that down (and change the E-flat to the German Es, or S, like Shostakovich did with his name), it looks like this: A – D min – S/F, or ADmS/F. (Frederick was Pepper Adams’s given name.)

 

If you’ve stuck with me so far, here’s one more example. He may have even used the shapes of letters to form musical fragments that turn into tunes. If you connect the dots in the melody at the longest phrase segment in his tune dedicated to his father Wilf Wheeler, “W.W” (transformed into his album title Double Double You), it appears to be the letter W. (The fact that every melodic fragment in the melody is echoed in each presentation tends to support this theory, thereby “doubling” each “W”.) (See Example 6.) He then could have used the developing variation technique described earlier to take that theme apart to construct the earlier sections of the tune, stitching each subphrase together, one note at a time.

 

I’m not arguing that Kenny used any of these techniques (or any specific process) exclusively. But it’s my theory of how he could have generated material when trying to get started. And of course, being so shy and self-deprecating, he likely might have found such game-like techniques too silly to explain out loud, simply avoiding the topic when it came up and leaving them for us to discover.

He certainly didn’t need much help. A gifted composer like Kenny – especially one who worked as hard as he did regularly over so many decades – sometimes just “discovers” a tune. He often said that the best melodies he wrote felt like they were already in existence somewhere in the ether, and he just accessed them first. For example, Part Six of his Sweet Time Suite, “Consolation: A Folk Song” is one of the most beautiful melodies that he ever penned: a seemingly simple tune – almost entirely diatonic – but with a stunning (and complex) harmonization. He called it “a gift from somewhere. I had it in my mind for about three years I think before I started writing it. I had this melody and I thought one day I’m going to write this for the big band, and I did.”

 

 

Kenny once told me the story of the first time he met a young composer named Maria Schneider. When they were introduced, she took his hand and kissed it, saying: “That was for ‘Consolation’”.

Special thanks to Pete Churchill, Bill Grimes, and Nick Smart for their feedback and advice on the contents of some of this article. Also – sincere gratitude to Jeff Perry for taking the time to help me with the analysis of “Sophie” and with putting a name to the “developing variation” technique.

 

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About the Author:

Brian Shaw is an active performer, arranger, and educator known for his versatility. He is one of the few trumpet players in the world equally comfortable in early music, orchestral, jazz, and commercial settings on modern and period instruments. He has released four albums as a soloist, and is principal trumpet with the Dallas Winds, Santa Fe Pro Musica, Spire Baroque Orchestra, and is a core member of the Pacific Northwest Ballet orchestra. A former Banff Centre student of Kenny Wheeler’s, Brian published a book of his solo transcriptions in 2000 and co-authored his biography Song for Someone (released 2025) with Nick Smart. He regularly teaches Baroque trumpet at the Eastman School of Music and was Professor of Trumpet and Jazz Studies at Louisiana State University for 15 years. He lives near Seattle with his wife Lana, their sons Thomas and Elliot, and their family dog Ernie.

 

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About Kenny Wheeler:

Trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler (1930–2014) was one of the most enigmatic and influential musicians in recent memory. His instantly recognizable sound as an instrumentalist and as a writer was a driving force within every major innovation in modern European jazz during the last half of the 20th century. More importantly, his life provides us with a profound example of the way music can manifest itself in the most unlikely of vessels. As a lonely and shy teenager in Canada, he sought refuge from his difficult home life in the friendships he forged through a mutual love of bebop. After an unexpectedly bold move to London at the age of 22, he struggled with his confidence for years before making his first big break with the John Dankworth Orchestra. Kenny would soon find his voice in a triumvirate of musical communities: straight-ahead jazz, the burgeoning free scene, and in the busy recording studios. The annual BBC broadcasts for which he composed, beginning in 1969, became an outlet for his creativity and experimentation with different sized ensembles and orchestration; paired with the incomparable voice of Norma Winstone, Kenny’s flugelhorn created a new sound in jazz big band writing. His membership in Anthony Braxton’s quartet in the early 1970s led him to exceed his already extremely high level of technique on the trumpet, and also introduced him to ECM founder and producer Manfred Eicher, who in turn featured Kenny on several influential albums as a leader, including the groundbreaking Gnu High (1975, with Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette), Deer Wan (1977), his iconic big band album Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990), The Widow in the Window (1990) and Angel Song (1997), the best-selling album of his career. During the 1980s, he was a member of Dave Holland’s influential quintet and taught each summer at Canada’s Banff Centre for the Arts until 1998. In the late 1990s, he became associated with the Italian CAMJazz label and recorded several chamber albums and a substantial big band album, The Long Waiting. Wheeler’s many honors include the Order of Canada, a weeklong Festival of New Trumpet Music dedicated to him in 2011 in New York, and an honorary Doctorate from the University of York. He also became honorary patron of the Junior Jazz Course at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Songs for Quintet, his final album, poignantly marked a final return to ECM before he died in September, 2014.

 

Cover photo source Dejan Vekic