Kenny Wheeler
Songs for Quintet
(ECM 2388)
4/5

WHEN you go through the pedestrian tunnels of Leytonstone Underground station in east London, you pass through a series of striking mosaics of scenes from films by Alfred Hitchcock, who spent his childhood over his father’s grocery shop in Leytonstone High Road. There’s even one of the boy Hitchcock on a pony outside his dad’s shop, with flags and bunting waving.

But if you leave the station and walk northwards towards Wallwood Road, you’ll find another memorial — a blue plaque commemorating another Leytonstone resident who made the Atlantic crossing in the opposite direction to Hitchcock and whose artistry, for more than 60 years, was at least the equal of the cinema legend.

Trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, born in Toronto in 1930, came to London as a young man where he was scooped up by the jazz scene and stayed. The plaque on the wall of the house where he lived with his family, dutifully practised his horn four hours a day and wrote his music, salutes him as “one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late 20th century.”

Wheeler died last year and the jazz world lost a luminous brassman, composer, arranger and teacher, whose unaffected modesty, shunning of the limelight and self-deprecation kept his brilliance mute for half a century. Yet among those who played with him, were inspired by his musicianship and listened to the burnished beauty of his sound, he was a comet.

He was joined on his last record, recorded at the Abbey Road studios in 2013, by some of his living confreres who played with him until the end and who knew it was a profound privilege to do so. Among them were saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, bassist Chris Laurence, guitarist John Parricelli and drummer Martin France.

“You only have a split second to decide what you’re going to do next,” Wheeler once said in an interview and that writing tunes saved him from the “burning edge” of relentless improvisation. Not that he wasn’t a master of the latter, as his years with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and forays with Evan Parker, John Stevens and Derek Bailey testified.

But this record is about his compositions as well as his playing and all the tunes on it are his.

Opener Seventy-six is prefaced by Parricelli’s chiming droplets of notes and Wheeler’s soft-focused solo — lullaby-like in its tenderness — is complemented by Sulzmann’s subdued sound.

The latter’s more prominent on Jigsaw, urging Wheeler and an ascendant Sulzmann on in their solos and there’s more lucid guitar rain from Paricelli before Laurence’s bass throbs and pulsates through the chorus.

The Long Waiting is one of Wheeler’s finest tunes, etched out by Parricelli and his own vulnerable-sounding horn.

Laurence’s slow and measured bass dance, gradually quickening at Wheeler’s entry, introduces Canter No 1.

Wheeler was wheelchair-bound by the time of the recoding yet he seems to claim all the space in the world, shared by a masterly Sulzmann, whose solos gradually up the tempo.

France’s introductory drums sound almost martial on Sly Eyes and Wheeler’s painterly response is underpinned by the warm strings of Laurence and Parricelli.

Sulzmann provides a free-sounding introduction to 1076 and the mystery of his opening to Old Time is followed by a forest of complex phrases from Wheeler. It shows how much their partnership meant to them both, as if it doesn’t matter at what time of life it’s forged.

The warmth of feeling between the five musicians emerges with every note, akin to that you’ll experience on the streets of Leytonstone where Wheeler walked for decades with his horn. He was a Canadian melodist in east London, much loved by those who made their music and learned from his reticent genius.