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Brian Shaw: “I’LL LEAVE THAT TO YOU, MR. DETECTIVE” – SOME THOUGHTS ON KENNY WHEELER’S COMPOSITIONAL PROCESS (April 2025)

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(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.

Example 1 – Pt. III of the Heyoke Suite (excerpt in Kenny’s manuscript) – courtesy of the Kenny Wheeler Archive, Royal Academy of Music.

 

Example 2 – mm. 1-7 of “W.W”

 

 

Example 3 – mm 1-8 of “Part One: Opening” from the Sweet Time Suite

 

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.

 

Example 4 – mm. 1-24 of “Sophie”

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.)

Example 5 – mm. 1-8 from “For P.A.”, Pt. IV of the Sweet Time Suite

 

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.

Example 6 – excerpt from “W.W”, red lines outlining possible “Ws” in the score

 

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.”

 

Example 7 – excerpt from “Consolation” – Part VI of the Sweet Time Suite

 

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.

 

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.

 

About Kenny Wheeler:

Photo by Barry Thompson

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

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John Korsrud: Introduction to Hocketing and Kenny Wheeler’s Last Work (December 2022)

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Hocket Night in Canada

I’m truly flattered to be asked to contribute to the ISJAC blog. Thank you for inviting me. Even though I grew up in Vancouver BC, playing trumpet in lots of big bands, funk, and salsa bands, my compositional training was in classical new music, and my compositional goal and interest is to bridge the gap between these diverse influences. I’m very conscious of trying to create something unique, while being impactful, exciting, and entertaining. In my quest for finding freshness, I look for unusual harmonic approaches, unusual forms/grooves/genres, and so on.

One way to create melodic freshness is with the seldom-used (but easily applied) technique of hocketing. This method, similar to klangfarbenmelodie, is the simple dividing of a melody between two or more instruments. This can create musical texture, rhythmic interplay, and the illusion of counterpoint. Excellent examples of hocketting can be found in in this brief passage of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto #3 (1921), and in this section of Louis Andriessen’s De Staat (1976). An interesting variation is the micro-canon effect found in David Lang’s Sweet Air (1999) or Louis Andriessen’s Hout (1991). Here the melodies are repeated an eighth note or quarter note later by others. A great effect.

My jazz orchestra composition, Cruel Yet Fair (1995), uses lots of repetition, transposition, quasi-twelve tone composition, and hocketing. This piece works very well live, and drummers love playing it. The groove is based on an Afro 12/8 and a half-time 12/8 feel, similar to Tower of Power’s Good Credit. It is also influenced harmonically and rhythmically by Alberto’s Ginastera’s 2nd String Quartet (1958). Ginastera showed me how a twelve-tone type language could have a forward propulsion that up until then, no other composer was doing. His music had a drive, tension, and excitement I was looking for.

Cruel Yet Fair Example 1: The violin and piano play the melody two octaves apart. Generally, I concentrate on orchestration and instrumental colour first, composing material to fit that. Here, I wanted to hear trombones in the very bottom part of their range; the melody is divided equally amongst them. I chose the melodic pitches so that no trombone would have to have slide changes of more than a minor third, which would otherwise be awkward at this tempo. Hocketting sounds smoother and is easier to play if the motifs overlap slightly, and it also sounds better if someone is playing the full melody, as the piano and violin are doing here. I further hocket the electric bass and electric guitar into two fragments.

Cruel Yet Fair Example 2: The violin plays the twelve-tone-esque melody and I wanted to hear the trumpets in a nice comfortable, yet bright, range. The three trumpets divide the melody equally and we get a bit of a three-over-four effect when they overlap slightly with each other and land on the downbeat–this alignment helps with rhythmic accuracy. The tenor saxophone plays every second note of the melody, as do trombones 2 and 3. I avoid octave doublings when I can for a cleaner sound and I think this is the only octave doubling in the piece. Then the melody is fragmented again, played by the trombone in its most powerful, highest, and brightest range, doubled in unison by soprano and alto saxophone. It’s a nice strong effect.

At Letter H we revisit the introduction and the main theme. At Letter I, we modulate up a half step to inject an extra kick of energy for the soloist, and also to put the soloist in a friendlier key. Letter K is the breakdown and the beginning of the climax, which occurs at the Golden Mean. The final chord is a twelve-tone cluster voiced within one octave.

 

Iguana (1993)

Click to See Full Score (RECORDING STARTS ON PAGE 5)

My piece Iguana (1993) has a groove that is mostly hip-hop swing, and it uses lots of hocketing. The piece was composed in several small segments, or micro-compositions, with little thought to where they would end up in the larger piece. In the end, it was assembled in quasi-collage form. I often make several photocopies of the score, cut them up with scissors, and then rearrange until it makes sense. I remember spending weeks on this form until I was happy with it. Well-known collage-style pieces included Django Bates’ New York, New York (1998), and John Zorn’s Speedfreaks (1991). Collage style is almost always discouraged in pedagogy, as it is often seen as a cheap trick to get away from having to develop your material, and I suppose there is much truth to that. But I think, done properly, it can be dramatic and entertaining.

Iguana Example 1 (m. 61 to 68 [about 0:56]): I try to find grooves and harmonic approaches that are off the beaten path. Here I’m using a hip-hop swing/shuffle and kick/snare pattern. The kick pattern is doubled in the bass, trombones 3 and 4, and bari sax. The snare pattern is found in the violin and trumpets. The saxophones are playing a chromatic pattern in 5/8, voiced in semitone clusters. The bass part is a Bb pedal, but the violin and trumpets are in B major. The trombones are hocketting a slightly overlapping 4/4 pattern. Though this section is quite atonal, it works because it is rhythmically interesting and repetitive enough. I find atonality or dissonance ceases to sound dissonant if it’s presented in rhythmically interesting ways, like it can be in hip-hop, rap, percussion ensembles, etc. Oops, I just noticed a mistake in the score. The drum snare shot in m. 81 should be on beat 4.

Iguana Example 2 (m. 224 – 229 [about 5:01]): Here we have two simultaneous hocketings. One is in the trumpets and upper saxophones, each with their own hocketting patterns. The other, outlining the bass part, is in the trombones and lower saxophones, each group with their own pattern. You can hear the division of parts much clearer live than in this recording — though I did try to pan things as much as possible. Iguana’s climax—also unintentionally at the Golden Mean—is one long ascending hocket starting at m. 256.

One of my recent pieces is Force Majeure (2000) for small ensemble, created in collaboration with filmmaker Jenn Strom and photographer Laurence Rooney. We try to create stability and instability by using several meters, visually and musically, creating anxiety, then resolution. I have long been interested in adding visual and theatrical elements into composition. Not only is this part of the evolution of making powerful art, but it is also a way for us musicians and composers to get our music on platforms such as Youtube and other platforms.

The 2013 Kenny Wheeler Commission

In 2013 Hard Rubber Orchestra commissioned and recorded Kenny Wheeler’s last large work. I have included links below to audio and to a copy of the score for the suite’s opening movement.
I contacted Kenny Wheeler in late 2012 about a small commission. I had heard that though Mr. Wheeler was unable to play trumpet for physical reasons, he “was still keen to compose.” I asked Mr. Wheeler for a ten-minute piece, but a few months later, to my surprise, Kenny mailed us original, hand-written scores for five movements. The work premiered October 19, 2013. Mr. Wheeler would pass away about a year later and we would lose a musical giant, His influence on jazz composers around the world cannot be overstated.
We recorded the Suite for Hard Rubber Orchestra, featuring Norma Winstone, in 2016 for Justin Time Records, and it may also be found on Soundcloud.

I have included the score to Movement I:

Click for the Full Score

 

Darcy James Argue also provided some wonderful liner notes for the album.

Every new album of Kenny Wheeler big band music is a blessing. For a composer of such significance, recordings of his large-scale works have been frustratingly few and far between. Now that he has left us, such documents have become even more precious, particularly this one: the Suite for Hard Rubber Orchestra is Wheeler’s final music for large ensemble.

The idea of commissioning Kenny Wheeler to write for the Hard Rubber Orchestra came from Vancouver-based trombonist Hugh Fraser, a longtime Wheeler confederate. During his final years, the physical exertions of brass playing made it difficult for Kenny to perform, but he was still eager to express himself compositionally — a late-career echo of the circumstances behind his initial big band outing, Windmill Tilter, written while he was forced to take time away from the horn to recover from an impacted wisdom tooth.

And so it came to pass that HRO director John Korsrud approached Wheeler in January of 2013 with the idea of applying for commissioning support from the Canada Council for the Arts. But apparently Kenny had music in him that needed writing, and no intention of waiting for the Canada Council to give him the green light. Just three months later, Hard Rubber Orchestra HQ got a rather unexpected phone call from Kenny letting them know the music was complete and a parcel of handwritten score pages was enroute! (Fortunately, the grant was in fact approved.) The HRO premiered the music that fall, on October 19, 2013 in a performance at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.

Wheeler’s manuscript contained a work in five movements but in no particular order, leaving the sequencing up to the ensemble. On this recording, they are interspersed with improvisations featuring Brad Turner, whose searching, intervallic approach to the trumpet is deeply informed by Kenny’s profound contributions to the instrument. Brad’s duets with bassist André Lachance, pianist Chris Gestrin, and guitarist Ron Samworth represent the unpremeditated side of Kenny’s art, recalling the freely improvised passages he often included as palette-cleansers between orchestrated works in live performance.

The Suite itself is a focused distillation of the ingredients found in all of Wheeler’s music: yearning melodies, serpentine counterpoint, lovingly-framed symmetry, deceptive harmonic resolutions, flowingly mixed meters, dark full sonorities burnished to a lustrous bronze… and of course, the sound of the human voice. Wheeler’s longtime friend and collaborator, Norma Winstone, brings her timelessly ethereal sound to Kenny’s swan song, and you can hear in her voice the accumulated sense-memory of decades of shared moments.

While this music is quintessentially Kenny, it is also full of delightful surprises: among them, the uncharacteristically rustic simplicity of Movement I’s blowing changes, the fiendishly acrobatic voice-and-guitar countermelody underneath Mike Herriott’s bravura flugelhorn solo in Movement II, the breezy, Jobim-like insouciance of Movement III’s melodic permutations, the baroque filigrees in Movement IV that launch Campbell Ryga’s alto solo, and the deeply affecting moment when the austerity of Movement V’s parallel perfect intervals gives way to warm, welcoming thirds.

Kenny Wheeler left us in the fall of 2014, but he left us with a gem, lovingly performed and recorded by an ensemble of deeply devoted musicians.

— Darcy James Argue

 

Thank you very much to the ISJAC blog for inviting me. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or comments. I hope this short blog was of interest to you.

 

About the Author:

John Korsrud is a composer and trumpeter living in Vancouver, Canada.

He is the leader and principal composer of the 18-piece Hard Rubber Orchestra, a jazz/ new music ensemble he formed in 1990. HRO has toured across Canada several times, to Europe, and released five CDs, most recently Iguana (2022), and Kenny Wheeler’s Suite for Hard Rubber Orchestra (2018). The orchestra has produced several multi-media shows, a television special and even a two new music ice shows including one for the 2010 Olympic Games. Hard Rubber Orchestra has commissioned over fifty Canadian composers from both jazz and classical backgrounds. Notable commissions include Kenny Wheeler, Darcy James Argue, Christine Jensen, Brad Turner, John Hollenbeck, Marianne Trudel, Giorgio Magnanensi, Keith Hamel, Linda Bouchard, Paul Dolden, Fred Stride, Hugh Fraser, and Rene Lussier.

John has been commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, where he performed his “Come to the Dark Side” for Orchestra and Trumpet at Carnegie Hall. Other commissions include the Vancouver Symphony, CBC Radio Orchestra, Albany Symphony New Music Festival, and several Canadian and Dutch ensembles.

He is the recipient of the 2001 Canada Council Joseph S. Stauffer Prize, 2003 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the 2012 City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for Music, and the 2015 Canada Council Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award. John was a frequent participant in programs at The Banff Centre between 1984 and 1994, and he studied composition with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Amterdam from 1995 to 1997.

As a trumpet player, John has played with international improvisors George Lewis, Barry Guy, Han Bennink and Anthony Braxton, and performed at jazz festivals in Berlin, Havana, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Chicago.

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John La Barbera: Basic Tools For Better Arranging (February 2019)

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I recently revisited a magazine article I did on arranging over 30 years ago to see how germane it is to today’s world of scoring.   Surprisingly, except for the fact that musical styles and industry practices have changed drastically (in the commercial advertising world we got paid to do demos and we recorded with live musicians), the basic tenants of presenting the fundamentals of arranging haven’t changed.   Here’s an abridged and slightly updated version of that article.

BASIC TOOLS FOR BETTER ARRANGING

“As a young arranger, I was always searching for some work that actually described the process involved in making orchestral arrangements.“- Glenn Miller, 1943

Well, Glenn, we’re still looking for that one text that gives us the secrets and lays it all out for us.  Unfortunately, that book will never exist, because arranging is an art that evolves hand-in-hand with music composition and technology; it is changing constantly.  And, since it is an art, one can’t effectively break it down into hard rules and regulations.  We can, however, list and explore the various musical techniques that one might use to get a working knowledge of the field.  It doesn’t matter if you use a pencil and score paper or a mouse and a notation program, the principles and techniques still apply.  “Okay, La Barbera, quit talking and show us some hip voicings.”   Sorry Glenn, no voicings yet.  So often, the novice assumes that the secrets of arranging lie in the chord voicings used by the various greats of the art.   Nothing could be further from the truth.   We have to learn what arranging is before we get to any of that.   Here’s my definition of arranging:

Arranging, in music, is the art of giving an existing melody musical variety for a listening audience.

The composer gives us the melody and we, as arrangers, strive to give it variety.   Henry Mancini has said, “The song is the thing, and the arranger’s function is to make it memorable, regardless of one’s personal feelings.”  And variety, musical variety – is what makes the song memorable.   This musical variety comes from our knowledge of the tools of arranging and how to use them.   An arranger is very much like a magician.  After presenting a melody to an audience we try musical sleight-of-hand to keep their attention, because if the audience can predict what’s going to happen next, we lose their attention and therefore are not as successful as arrangers.  We’ll list some of those tools in a little while, but first I want to explain the last part of my definition – the audience.

As arrangers (or composers or performers for that matter) we are always dealing with an audience, whether real or imaginary.   If we wrote or played music just for ourselves, it would not truly be a creative art.   To be successful in the musical arts, one must always acknowledge the existence of a listener and create accordingly.  It’s somewhat like the old riddle of “if a tree falls on your Pro Tools Rig in the woods and there is no one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound?“  Suffice it to say that with even one set of ears around, the whole event has an impact.  It becomes memorable.  I believe that the success of our great arrangers is partially due to their conscious or subconscious acknowledgement of a listening audience.  So, if you think about it, the arranger’s job is to take a melody/song and play it for an audience for a certain length of time without boring them.  If we played the same melody over and over with the same instruments for six minutes, with the same chord changes, they’d be searching for the rotten egg emoji.  We have to give it variety and make it memorable so as to keep the audience’s attention.  It’s just that simple.  How we keep their attention shows our talent as arrangers.  If we wanted to break down my definition into rules or commandments of arranging, we’d arrive at something like the following.

Rule 1: Thou Shalt Not Bore. 

Strive to give the song or melody as much variety as necessary to capture and please an audience, while at the same time keeping the integrity of the composer’s musical idea.  This is such a fine line – balancing one’s arranging techniques against the intent of the composer while maintaining a stamp of individuality – that it can take a lifetime to learn to do it consistently.

Rule 2: Know Thy Place. 

We must always remember that, as arrangers, we’re subservient to the melody and must write accordingly.  Unlike composers, we arrangers are not allowed the luxury of personal likes and dislikes when it comes to the melody or the musical style we have to work in.  Disdain for a certain style or song shows through in your musical arrangement.  (The hardest job I ever had was when Count Basie asked me to arrange Rubenstein’s “Melody In F”  for his band.  I didn’t care for the song as a Basie-style tune, and I stared at blank score pages for weeks.) We have to divorce ourselves from our musical prejudices, listen to all kinds of music, and be prepared to cover any style with sincerity.  Remember what Hank Mancini said – “regardless of one’s personal feelings.”

Rule 3: Know Thy Boss. 

Remember that we are ultimately working for someone else.  When we take the job of arranger, we are not working for ourselves but for an audience with a composer or producer in between.  We must strive to please both but fight like hell for the audience when confronted with a choice.  I tell students that if I can get five percent of John La Barbera (a creative uniqueness or stamp of identity) in a chart, I’m more than pleased.  The hardest pill to swallow is when you bring your finished masterpiece to a bandleader or producer and he/she immediately cuts out the hippest interlude you’ve ever written.  All of us, no matter how famous we become, must be prepared to give up our most prized musical child at the whim of the client.  The best advice I ever received from any arranging book was from Mancini’s Sounds And Scores [Cherry Lane].  I underlined the last paragraph on page 1 in my copy:  ” …  Finally, don’t fall in love with every note you write … Be prepared to eliminate anything that tends to clutter up your score, painful as it may be to do so.”  Even if you are the composer /producer and it’s your record label featuring you as the artist, the audience is still the boss.  Keep that in mind and you’ll find arranging decisions much easier to make.  Now then, if you’re still with me, we’ll move on.

Rule 4: Know Thy Styles. 

We must be familiar with the idiom in which we intend to place the melody.  In simpler terms, if you have never listened to current pop styles like R&B, or Country Blues groove, etc., then you can’t successfully arrange a melody in those styles.  Or, if you’ve never heard second line, you’ll be spinning your wheels when it comes time to cover that style.  So, it’s obvious that if you aren’t familiar with a style of music, you can’t competently arrange in it.  That seems pretty obvious, but I’ve seen students try to arrange a big band jazz chart who have never heard of Basie or listened to Stan, Woody or Duke.  So, before we can become arrangers, we have to know our musical styles and learn what instruments, rhythms, and harmonies are basic to each idiom. 

Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of arranging by listing some of our tools and putting them in an arranging road case.  These are what I call the five basic variations used in arranging, and we’ll get our roadie to pull them out one at a time and illustrate how each of them works.  The devices in each category are just a starting point.  I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas so add those as necessary.

RHYTHMIC VARIATION

1.  Change the rhythm of the melody.  Of course, no brainer.

2.  Change the rhythmic feel; double time, half time etc.

3.  Gradually speed up or slow down the tempo.

4 .Refrain from using one rhythm for any length of time. 

5.  Displace the melody relative to the bar line by a uniform value.

6.  Change the meter 4/4 to 3/4.  (My arrangement of “So What”  is a good illustration)

Slightly varying the rhythm gives new life to the melody however, this is effective ONLY after you’ve stated the original.

The audience needs a reference before it recognizes a variation.  I believe this is true for all of the variations we incorporate.   

It’s been a common practice for years to go to double time for the blowing on a ballad and then back to the original tempo to take it out.  Gradually speeding up and slowing down is a great device (Brad Mehldau and other groups have used this very effectively) but it takes some rehearsing.   

Changing the meter is a great way to add variety.  My arrangement of “So What”  is a good illustration.

Then imply 4/4  and eventually get there.

The next tool in our road case is

HARMONIC VARIATION

1.  Substitute chord changes (reharmonization).

2.  Change melodic modes (major to minor).

3.  Use counterpoint to imply new harmonies.

4.  Modulate to new keys, either subtly or drastically.

Every melody comes with its own harmony or set of chord changes, whether given or implied.  If we change the harmony after our audience has heard and absorbed the original chord changes, we automatically create variety.  So, the use of substitute chord changes, or reharmonization, is one device in the harmonic category.   Another secret that seasoned writers share is that a new device introduced into the chart has effect, but the more devices or variations you add to a chart at the same time, the less impact each will have (i.e.  modulating and using a substitute change for the new target key down beat…softens the impact).  Keep this in mind when you are  tempted to empty the whole road case of tools into the same section of a melody.  As with all devices in arranging, we must remember that we are working for the song.  Anything we add has to support the melody and not overpower it.  I find that harmonic variation is the one tool that’s most overused by arrangers and is an area where we can get into the most trouble.  Hip changes, used for the sake of being hip, rarely fit comfortably into a well-balanced chart.

Now that we have two arranging tools at our disposal.  Let’s go on to another.  I call the next device:

PERFORMANCE VARIATION

1.  Vary the articulations of the melody. 

2.  Vary the dynamics of a phrase or section. 

3 .Use ornaments, such as trills, turns, and grace notes. 

4.  Use pitch-bend or modulation.

5.  Take advantage of the basic instrument mutes (plungers, straight mutes, hats, etc.) and combinations thereof (plunger wa-wa over straight mute, bucket over straight, cup in bucket, etc.).

6.  Use effects that are unique to individual instruments, such as half valves, squeaks, flutter tongue, sub tone, etc. 

Performance variations encompass quite a few items that we don’t always think of when doing an arrangement and, to me, is one of the most important tools we can use.  I believe it’s what’s above & below the notes that make music and the uniqueness of an arrangement. 

These are the performance techniques are the one uses when playing music – articulations (long, short, etc.), ornaments (turns, trills, shakes, flips, pitch-bend, vibrato, etc.), and dynamics (crescendo, decrescendo, subito p, sforzando, etc.).  Using any of these performance devices in your arrangement is a sign of a seasoned writer.   Just as an orchestra conductor studies all of the nuances of string bowing techniques, we must be familiar with all of the unique sounds and variances of each instrument in the band.

Mixtures of muted and open instruments is a wonderful way to add variety to an already stated melody…it adds color and the repetition of the melody is acceptable to an audience.   The hat or derby is probably one of the most versatile mutes for brass but it has fallen out of favor these days.  Muted brass in buckets produce wonderful colors.  Look how a bone deep in the hat coupled with alto and trumpet creates a life like French horn sound at the end of the shout chorus.

Also, like Basie, using cresendi, subito p, and back and forth adds so much variety to the passage.

Here’s a link to the entire chart in case you want to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZIA_zYlF_0

“What about chord voicings , aren’t you ever going to get to chord voicings like clarinet lead over two altos and two tenors?”

Sorry, Glenn, not yet.  But that brings up an interesting point.  People tend to interchange orchestration and voicing.  They use the term voicing when they really mean orchestration and vice-versa.  It’s very important to understand the difference.

When beginning students come to me with questions about arranging, the first thing they usually say is something like, “I’ve been working on this chart and I want to use this sax voicing but I’m not sure if it will sound.”  Or, “Will this half step between the cellos and violas work?”  This aspect of arranging, the voicing and orchestrating of chords , is just another tool in the art, but it always seems to attract the most attention.  I guess it’s like a slick paint job on a Porsche – the most important parts are under the hood, but the paint job gets the attention, So, let’s clear this up right now.  Voicing is the putting together of chords in a certain way, with the notes stacked in a certain order.  Orchestration is simply what instruments are assigned to play the notes you included in the voicing.

VOICING

1.  Close.

2.  Open.

3.  Cluster.

4.  Unisons & Octaves.

Let’s talk about voicings.  We all should know the difference between a closed voicing and an open voicing, a cluster and an octave unison.  Voicing techniques, especially in jazz, are usually the individuality stamp of the arranger.  I would voice and orchestrate a certain passage differently from my colleagues.  If we’ve listened enough to any idiom we can probably pick out the individual arrangers by their style and voicing techniques.  Traditionally, a composer/arranger would give a sketch of his or her work to an orchestrator, who, in turn, would use standard rules for assigning the different musical lines and chords to conventional bodies of instruments.  In today’s music, there are so many new instruments, recording techniques, and consolidations of music styles that there are fewer and fewer standard rules of orchestration.  So what was once a separate trade has now become an additional, necessary skill of the arranger. 

To recap, the voicing is the type of chord structure (unison, close, open, octave, unison, cluster, etc.) and the orchestration is the body of instruments assigned to play the voicing.  Orchestration and voicing allow us to create unique sounds or musical colors by combining different instruments.  If we think of voicing and orchestration as two separate entities, it will be much easier to understand our job as arrangers.

On top of the endless possibilities and permutations of traditional acoustic instruments, we now have to contend with the modern instruments (world instruments, synths, samples, etc.).  These new instruments are a challenge in themselves, and the combining of acoustic and electronic instruments gives us further combinations with which to achieve unique musical colors.  We can truly spend a lifetime experimenting with voicing and orchestration, but it shouldn’t take the beginning arranger that long to find those combinations that fit and seem comfortable with his or her writing techniques.  These combinations go toward making up an arranger’s style.  For example, Nelson Riddle’s harmonic variation use of Lydian motifs identifies his work just as Gil Evans’ and Duke Ellington’s unique orchestration of their voicings identify their work.

Simply changing a line from unison to octaves gives it an entirely new character and an audience will accept the same backgrounds and chord changes.  Here’s an example using my arrangement of “Esperanza.”

Here’s a link to full video of the chart in case you want to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHN0FEgQRRY

There is one more device – melodic variation.

“Hey, that’s the composer’s job!”

Yes Glenn, sort of.  Melodic variation, this last piece of essential equipment, is composition.  The composer rarely gives us intros or endings.  The arranger is usually expected to furnish those.  We arrangers are also required to compose counterlines, interludes, and background melodies as well, in order to give existing material variety.  Here are some thoughts worth pondering:

“Arranging, after all, is a euphemism,” according to Alex Wilder, “For it includes composition as well as orchestration. The introductions, countermelodies, transitions, and reharmonizing are all more than just orchestration.  But by using the word arrangement, they get two skills for the price of one.” 

“The true art of orchestration,” Walter Piston declared ,”is inseparable from the creative act of composing music.” 

And from Nelson Riddle: “An arranger occupies, in music, that shifting, almost indefinable ground between an orchestrator and composer.”

MELODIC VARIATION

1.  Creating and using countermelodies against melody.

2.  Variation of melody or fragment of melody used for interludes between sections.

3.  Introductions and endings based on newly created material.

It’s undeniable that arrangers must wear many hats in today’s music industry and must function sometimes as composers and orchestrators.  That’s why arranging is not a hack trade but an art that takes years to perfect.  So if you get discouraged because it doesn’t come to you right away, or, if after years of arranging, you still seem to get stuck, don’t worry;  join the club.

About the Author:

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John P. La Barbera is a Grammy® nominated composer/arranger whose writing spans many styles and genres. His works have been recorded and performed by Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Mel Torme, Chaka Khan, Harry James, Bill Watrous, and Phil Woods just to name a few. Though his major output has been in jazz, he has had works performed and recorded for symphony orchestra, string chamber orchestra, brass quintet, and other diverse ensembles. Most recently, Mr. La Barbera was chosen from among dozens of applicants to participate in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute at UCLA. As a result, John was one of sixteen composers commissioned by the JCOI to compose new works that meld jazz and symphonic music. “Morro da Babilonia” was the resulting work and was presented by the American Composers Orchestra in New York City at Columbia University’s Miller Hall. His “Drover Trilogy” for string orchestra and corno da caccia was recorded by the late Dr. Michael Tunnell and has recently been released on Centaur Records. John’s Grammy® nominated big band CD “On The Wild Side“ along with “Fantazm“ and his latest “Caravan” on the Jazz Compass® label, have been met with tremendous artistic and commercial success and are on the way to becoming a jazz big band standards. As co-producer and arranger for The Glenn Miller Orchestra Christmas recordings (In The Christmas Mood I & II) John has received Gold & Platinum Records and his arrangement of “Jingle Bells” from those recordings can be heard in the Academy Award winning film “La La Land.” Mr. La Barbera is a Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Louisville’s School of Music and an international clinician/lecturer whose topics range from composing/arranging to intellectual property and copyright. Among his numerous organizational affiliations are Jazz Education Network, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, NARAS, American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, and a writer/publisher member of ASCAP since 1971.

John’s Sunday morning big band jazz radio show, “Best Coast Jazz” on WFPK has been a mainstay on public radio for over twenty years and is streamed worldwide. He is a two-time recipient of The National Endowment for The Arts award for Jazz Composition and has served as a panelist for the NEA in the music category. His career has recently been profiled in “Bebop, Swing and Bella Musica: Jazz and the Italian American Experience” and in dozens of publications and encyclopedias. John’s published works are considered standards in the field of jazz education.

 

Artist Blog

JC Sanford: Electronic Effects as Orchestration (by a novice)

Editor’s note: At various times throughout my tenure as ISJAC blog curator, and scheduled blogging artist fell through late in the game for any number of reasons, so in that case I would often step in to supply a blog for that month. It’s perhaps poetic that for my penultimate curated blog, I am once more in this position. I promise I did not conspire to do this at a time that coincided with the release of my new album, but here you go. During the pandemic, I, like most of you, was trying to investigate ways I might move forward as an artist once we would all be able to play music together again. For me, part of this came out of regularly playing informally with some friends in my little town of Northfield, Minnesota. Both of these guys had very different musical training than me, but they had an understanding of the electronic side of things that I had never investigated. So in our collective improvisations, I started to experiment with a delay/loop pedal. Now I’ve heard countless horn players utilizing electronics over the years, none more notable to me than one of my most important improvisational influences, trombonist Hal Crook. But I had long resisted going down the pedal rabbit hole, partially because of expense, but also I thought I had enough to focus on as a trombonist/composer/bandleader/etc., that I just didn’t see it as practical to add another dimension to what I was doing musically. But this new sonic experience and the feedback I started to receive when using this new technique on live gigs awakened an interest I had long avoided. When I began to explore these electronic possibilities more deeply, I was concerned I was kind of a poser with so many experienced guitarists…

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Zhengtao Pan: Scenery In My Story

Zhengtao Pan: Scenery In My Story Counterpoint writing in modern large jazz ensemble music   I recently released my debut jazz orchestra album, “Scenery In My Story,” with Outside In Music. Initially planning to study film scoring at Berklee, I was captivated by the sounds of big bands, particularly Jim McNeely’s work. Despite my growing interest, I struggled to see myself as a “jazz musician” among peers who were more experienced. Meeting my first jazz mentor, Steven Feifke, was transformative. He introduced me to pivotal albums like Maria Schneider’s “Concert In The Garden,” Steven Feifke’s “Kinetic,” and Miho Hazama’s “Dancer In Nowhere.” These albums were my first real experiences with jazz, much to the disbelief of many. Steven’s advice, “You don’t need to be good at playing to write music,” reshaped my approach. This reassurance led to my first big band piece, “Dancing In The Dream,” and continued growth in compositions like “Mirror, Floating On The Water” and “On That Bus.” While my cultural background discouraged making mistakes, I’ve overcome a long way to see them as opportunities for growth. Embracing 融会贯通 (integrating knowledge), I explored diverse influences—from folk-inspired melodies to heavy-metal djent combined with Messiaen modes. “Scenery In My Story” embodies my Berklee journey, highlighting that personal expression shapes our music. After a little bit of my background, musical journey, and the inspiration for this album I’d like to talk about an essential compositional technique that I use throughout the album: counterpoint.   Counterpoint writing for large jazz ensemble in modern setting Counterpoints are very useful tools in jazz, and because of the certain level of space and freedom given in a jazz setting, counterpoints don’t have to follow strict rules to create a certain effect. Instead, counterpoint can be used as an interesting way to express your ideas…

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Artist Blog

Brian Shaw: “I’LL LEAVE THAT TO YOU, MR. DETECTIVE” – SOME THOUGHTS ON KENNY WHEELER’S COMPOSITIONAL PROCESS

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(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.

Example 1 – Pt. III of the Heyoke Suite (excerpt in Kenny’s manuscript) – courtesy of the Kenny Wheeler Archive, Royal Academy of Music.

 

Example 2 – mm. 1-7 of “W.W”

 

 

Example 3 – mm 1-8 of “Part One: Opening” from the Sweet Time Suite

 

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.

 

Example 4 – mm. 1-24 of “Sophie”

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.)

Example 5 – mm. 1-8 from “For P.A.”, Pt. IV of the Sweet Time Suite

 

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.

Example 6 – excerpt from “W.W”, red lines outlining possible “Ws” in the score

 

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.”

 

Example 7 – excerpt from “Consolation” – Part VI of the Sweet Time Suite

 

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.

 

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.

 

About Kenny Wheeler:

Photo by Barry Thompson

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

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