“Reviving the past is both impossible and a waste of time.”

Thanks to JC Sanford and to ISJAC for inviting me to contribute to this fantastic blog. I am honored to be in company with all the talented musicians who have written articles for this blog. I am thrilled to say that my book project on ArtistShare, Bob Brookmeyer in Conversation with Dave Rivello, has finally been released, but before I give you information about the project itself, I want to tell you a bit about my experiences with Brookmeyer’s music, how I met Bob, and how this book came to be.

My story with Bob Brookmeyer actually begins from my undergrad days at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. A fellow student in the jazz program caught me after big band rehearsal one day and told me to go the local record store and buy the album Bob Brookmeyer, Composer Arranger with Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra. I went over that day and picked it up. When I got home, I put it on the turntable and as the first notes of Ding, Dong, Ding rang out, my whole world changed. Up until then, I had listened to a lot of big band music – Thad Jones, Basie, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich and others – but I never heard anything like what I was hearing at that moment. I wore this record out, I played it so much, and when the next album with Bob and Mel came out, Make Me Smile & Other New Works, I wore that album out, too. (We sometimes jokingly refer to Make Me Smile & Other New Works as the “Brookmeyer White Album” because of its original LP cover.) This recording further expanded my sonic horizons and made me want to be a composer even more, and to be one more than anything else. Every time I listened to these two recordings, I thought to myself, “I wonder what it would be like to meet Bob Brookmeyer?” and “I wonder if that could happen someday?”

Well, not only did I get to meet him, but I got to spend fifteen amazing years working with him, first as his copyist, then as his student, and ultimately as his friend. Every time I visited, even in the later years when I’d go just to hang out for a weekend, he always continued to slip in a lesson and they were always exactly what I needed to hear at that moment, to further my work. But again, I jumped ahead, so let me go back and catch up with the story.

In the mid 1990’s, Fred Sturm (then Chair of the Eastman School of Music Jazz and Contemporary Media program), told me that there was a new Brookmeyer recording called Electricity, but that it was only available in Europe. He suggested I call Bob to get a copy and he gave me Bob’s phone number in New Hampshire. When I finally got up the nerve to make the call, I dialed, hoping that I would get his answer machine and that I could just leave a message, but Bob answered the phone. I was a bit nervous, but after only a few minute’s conversation, Bob put me right at ease.

As it turned out, he knew my name from Manny Albam. He and Manny were co-teaching the BMI Jazz Composer’s Workshop in New York City. I knew Manny from the Arranger’s Holiday summer program at Eastman, headed by Rayburn Wright. Bob and I talked for a few minutes about his new CD, and then he asked me what else I did besides composing. I told him I had also worked as a professional copyist for years. This was right on the edge of Finale coming in and he asked me if I copied by hand or on the computer. I told him I did both, but preferred copying by hand. He told me he might need me some day, and also, that he would send me his Electricity CD. I hung up and thought, “Brookmeyer is so progressive, he probably wants computer copying and I probably just messed that one up.”

A couple of weeks later, though, I got a call from Bob. He said, “Dave, it’s Brookmeyer – I need you!” He told me he was very behind on writing a four-movement suite for Clark Terry’s seventy-fifth birthday concert and wanted to know if I could copy it. Then he stated, “And I want hand copying.”

I, of course, said yes. I couldn’t believe my luck – that I would get to see a Brookmeyer piece before anyone else and get to study it… but there was no time for studying at that point. Bob wasn’t joking when he said he was behind. I got to know the Fed-Ex guy by his first name. Every day more pages arrived. I hired two proofreaders, so that one of them was always in my house. I wish I would have taken a picture of the stack of parts before I sent them to Germany. The pieces I copied were Silver Lining, Gwen, Glide, and Blue Devils. During this time, when I would call Bob with note questions, I said I would love to take a lesson with him. He said that we would find a time for that.

Shortly after the Clark Terry project was done, Bob called and gave me a date for the lesson. He told me to bring some of my work, and that I could decide if I wanted to work with him, and that he would decide if he wanted to work with me. I knew the answer to my half of this equation, but thought that if he said, “No, sorry kid…” – well, thankfully that didn’t happen, and he took me on as his student.

As many who knew him will tell you, Bob was incredibly generous. He knew that I couldn’t afford to pay for the lessons, so, as I mentioned in my Preface to the book, our agreement was that we would barter copywork for the lessons, but somehow every time I copied for him, there was a “budget” for copying from whoever was commissioning the music. In other words, he never let me pay. Along with this, he always made me call ‘collect’ for our phone lessons. So, when he turned eighty, I wanted to do something special for him. I organized an eightieth birthday concert at the Eastman School of Music. We played two hours of his music programmed chronologically and then, as an extra, I asked Bill Holman, Jim McNeely, John Hollenbeck, and Ryan Truesdell to each write a one-minute tribute to Bob on “Happy Birthday”. I also wrote one. I interspersed these “commissions” throughout the program. After the concert, we had a reception upstairs outside the Kilbourn Hall doors. I have a great picture of Bob blowing out the candles on the birthday cake we got for the occasion. I felt that it was a small thank you on my part for all he had given me. He wrote about it afterward and was clearly moved by the evening.

Bob’s Memorial Service

The other thing that I did around this time, was take a page from his playbook. He once told me that later in Bill Finegan’s life (Bill was Bob’s hero), he called Bill once a week, always asking if his pencil was moving. I started doing the same thing every week with Bob – I don’t know if he ever connected it.

“You can’t find your future by ear – you’re either hearing your past or someone else’s.”

From my first lesson on April 16, 1996, Bob changed my life. The compositional exercises and the Three-Pitch Module Approach to composition that he developed are what I have been teaching at the Eastman School of Music for the past several years and are life-changing for all of the students who go through them. These exercises certainly changed and shaped my own writing. I realized then that the only way to get these unique exercises and the Three-Pitch Module Approach, was to study with Bob, or to study with someone who studied with Bob.

A few years into working with Bob, I started thinking that I would like to write a book about him and his compositional processes so that this information would be available to all. We both shared a love of books and particularly books of composers in conversation. There were several that we would often talk about – Conversations with Witold Lutoslawski, Ligeti In Conversation, Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman Says, and Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds – a conversation with Elliott Carter. So that is where I began my project from, and Bob Brookmeyer in Conversation with Dave Rivello is the result.

After Bob and I discussed the idea of the book and decided on a time we could sit down and talk, he had me come to his house for a few days in February 2010. It was during that weekend visit that I recorded over ten hours of Bob answering my questions, with his answers often making me think of new questions to ask. During those three days, we recorded the interviews that would eventually become the book, and then late into the nights we would listen to – and talk about – music. When the book was finally finished, I thought that there would be no one better to write the Foreword than Jim McNeely, so I contacted him, and he graciously agreed to write it. It couldn’t be more fitting.

Since this is an ArtistShare® project, there is also an entire web component. Here is a list of the web content:

“The first solo only happens when nothing else can.”

In the book, Bob and I discuss all of the exercises and how to do them. My own homework, along with Bob’s corrections, is part of the downloads that come with the project on the Composer Participant level, in the streaming audio lessons. Here is a page from the book and is the first assignment (in Bob’s hand) that he had me do. The “White Note” exercise:

Here is another example from my first lesson:

The book also includes three appendices: Bob’s suggested listening list (mostly modern classical pieces), a list of Brookmeyer quotes (compiled from my lessons and many other sources), and a list of compositions starting from 1979, which was the year Bob returned to composition after a ten-year hiatus.

I will leave you with a couple of quotes from the back of the book:

“Brilliance and wisdom abound in this treasure of a book that is pure Brookmeyer gold. We can all be thankful to Dave Rivello (whom Bob loved and trusted) for having the foresight to conduct these wonderful interviews. Thanks to Dave, Bob’s tremendous insights are not lost treasures, but ones that will continue to enrich us all.” – Maria Schneider, composer and bandleader

“Dave, what a great idea! I can’t wait to get into the book and see the processes that Bob sometimes would glide over… as if we had an idea what he was talking about. – Bill Holman, composer and bandleader

I sincerely hope this article has given you some perspective on Bob Brookmeyer and will lead you to look further into his work. His archive of original manuscripts, and many personal documents and papers, is housed at the Eastman School of Music Sibley Library in Rochester, New York.

Bob Brookmeyer in Conversation with Dave Rivello can be found here:

https://www.artistshare.com/Projects/Experience/22/499/1/Bob-Brookmeyer-Music-Bob-Brookmeyer-In-Conversation-with-Dave-Rivello?v=2

Cover painting by Dutch painter Nikolaj Dielemans: http://www.nikolajdielemans.com

AND JC – here also is a great link to the Youtube video from Bob’s memorial service of his life and music that Maria, Ryan and Marie Le Claire put together, called The Life and Music of Bob Brookmeyer. I think it would be great to include this link also.

About the Author:

Dave Rivello is an American-born composer, arranger, conductor and bandleader working primarily in Jazz, Contemporary Media, and Modern Classical idioms. He apprenticed with Rayburn Wright, Bob Brookmeyer, Manny Albam, Bill Holman, and Sam D’Angelo.

He leads a 12- piece ensemble (The Dave Rivello Ensemble) that is his main orchestral voice. He is also the author of the book, Bob Brookmeyer in Conversation with Dave Rivello (ArtistShare). His debut recording, Facing The Mirror, received strong praise from reviewers in the United States, Italy and Ireland. The Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll chose Facing The Mirror as the Debut Release of that year.

He co-produced the Gil Evans Project live recording, Lines of Color – with leader Ryan Truesdell, which was nominated for a Grammy. He also recently co-produced Jennifer Bellor’s recording, Reflections at Dusk, on Innova Recordings.

He has served as composer-in-residence at a number of schools, writing for their ensembles, giving clinics as well as private lessons. His residencies have been sponsored by Meet The Composer, Harvard Project Zero, and The New York Council of the Arts. He has written for and been commissioned by: The Smithsonian Institute, The United States Air Forces in Europe Band, The University of North Carolina-Wilmington, The Youngstown Symphony Orchestra, The Penfield Symphony Orchestra, The Eastman Wind Ensemble, Bobby McFerrin, David Taylor, Phil Woods, Randy Brecker, Regina Carter, the Airmen of Note, The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and many others. His music has been widely performed throughout the U.S. as well as in Germany and Spain. He is also on the faculty at the world-renowned Eastman School of Music.

He will be presenting on Bob’s Compositional Exercises at the Jazz Education Network conference in New Orleans this January. The presentation is Thursday January 9^th from 1:00-1:50 PM.

http://www.daverivello.com

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/daverivello

https://www.artistshare.com/Projects/Experience/22/499/1/Bob-Brookmeyer-Music-Bob-Brookmeyer-In-Conversation-with-Dave-Rivello?v=2

(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