Kenny Wheeler Legacy - Some Days Are Better: The Lost Scores

Recorded in partnership between the Royal Academy of Music (London) and the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in London, Some Days Are Better comes to light directly following what would have been Wheeler’s 95th birthday (on January 14), and in tandem with the launch of Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler (Brian Shaw and Nick Smart, Equinox Publishing).

Kenny Wheeler is considered one of the most influential figures in contemporary jazz. Born in Toronto in 1930 but based in the UK from 1952, by the 1960’s Wheeler had become highly regarded in the London scene, known as a post-bop trumpeter and flugelhorn player inspired by Clifford Brown and Art Farmer, but also as a pioneering free player moving into unexplored territory alongside improvisers such as John Stevens, Evan Parker, Dave Holland and Derek Bailey. He died in 2014 at the age of 84, leaving behind an impactful legacy that has remained a towering influence for legions of acolytes. Legendary bassist and NEA jazz master, Dave Holland, a lifelong colleague of Wheeler, characterized him as so: “Kenny was a true original, always in the music. For his generation, he contributed a harmonic language, which at that time was brand new. Who he was, as a person, was embodied in the music in a certain way, which is the highest form of artistry.”

Some Days Are Better focuses on a distinct period of Wheeler’s musical output that has, up until now, gone largely unheard, and is regarded as a “missing link” in his catalog. Wheelers debut release as a composer was Windmill Tilter by the John Dankworth Band, released in 1968. Immediately following that, when he was finally the leader of his own big band, there was a four-year period during which his only venue was annual/bi-annual BBC broadcasts. In this highly fertile period, a bold new approach emerged that combined his now legendary exquisite harmonic and melodic touch, but with the fire and fearlessness of all his free-jazz sensibilities from the same period. The only public record of this period is the 1973 recording Song For Someone, Wheeler’s true debut as a leader.

This was a period of rapid growth and development for an already mature artist, a largely undocumented outpouring of bold, experimental and beautiful music whose conception was made possible only because of the circumstances that coalesced for Kenny at that exact moment. It was also music that burned fast and bright in his catalog, before further circumstances required the consolidation into the more distilled, and perhaps even conventional, large ensemble music he is known more widely for.

“While researching the BBC archives for the writing of his biography, it became clear that the music from these early broadcasts was critical in filling out the picture of Kenny’s personality as a composer,” Nick Smart, Head of Jazz Programmes at the Royal Academy of Music in London, remarked. “We had also acquired the Kenny Wheeler Archive into the Royal Academy’s Collections in 2012, and it became apparent that much of this music was contained within the many plastic bags and cardboard boxes we’d unloaded from his attic.”