Kenny Wheeler Quintet "The Widow In The Window"

ECM 1417   843 198-2

Kenny Wheeler   Fluegelhorn, Trumpet
John Abercrombie   Guitar
John Taylor   Piano
Dave Holland   Bass
Peter Erskine   Drums

All compositions by Kenny Wheeler

Digital Recording, February 1990, Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Cover Photos and Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Manfred Eicher

An ECM Production

1990 ECM Records GmbH

ECM Records
Gleichmannstraße 10
8000 München 60

Kenny Wheeler, in typically self-mocking mood, once referred to his writing procedure as "a system of de-composing, really". It was a matter, he said, of sitting at the piano for hours on end and "getting rid of ideas" until the composition, by process of elimination, began to emerge. To which one can only say: more artists should be as stringent with the muse. There is absolutely no wastage in Wheeler's writing, no indulgences, nothing casual or carelessly tossed off. All his work seems imbued with an imperturbable logic and rightness, a sense of balance and proportion sustained, indeed, heightened, when the compositions broach uncommon harmonies, reaching beyond jazz's conventional palette to find colours that darkly glow or shimmer brightly.

Speaking of the piece "Ana", Alexander von Schlippenbach recently alluded to its mood of "proud solemnity", a description that could be extended to several of the compositions here. Despite Wheeler's diffident attitude to his work in interviews (expressing the insecurities other players, secretly, share) and the smoke screens thrown up by his punning song titles, this is serious music, though never "heavy" or ponderous. Buoyancy, in fact, is a quality evident in much of Wheeler's writing. It floats. In its earnestness, and its poetic lyricism, it stands apart from most contemporary jazz.

Finding the musicians with the appropriate sensitivities to play Wheeler's pieces is not a particularly easy task, but on his four previous ECM leader dates — "Gnu High" (1975), "Deer Wan" (1977), "Around 6" (1979), and "Double, Double You" (1983) — he has had some pretty splendid help, musicians as different as Keith Jarrett and Evan Parker and Michael Brecker and Edward Vesala lending their weight to the sessions. Each of these "production projects" has much to recommend it (I'm particularly fond of "Deer Wan", still, a wonderful album). Nonetheless there are limits to how deeply the best one-off recording session can mine the subtleties of music as refined as Wheeler's.

For "The Widow In The Window", the band came prepared. The quintet was assembled originally for a UK tour two years ago, after the trumpeter's friend Nick Purnell had worked his way through the tangled maze of conflicting schedules. The tour was a resounding artistic success, and everybody involved expressed hope in the furtherance of the project.

Some of the group's inner relationships, of course, go back a long way Dave Holland and Wheeler played together in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1967-68 and again in Anthony Braxton's mid-70's quartet. The bassist appears on three of Wheeler's previous ECM records, and Kenny, through the 1980's, was a member of Holland's Quintet. Dave acknowledges that Wheeler's harmonic imagination has been a major influence on his own writing.

John Taylor and Wheeler were both members of the John Dankworth Orchestra, played together in Alan Skidmore's hot 1968 quintet and have been in and out of each other's groups ever since. ECM has also issued four albums of their lambent aquarelles with Azimuth, the trio (completed by Norma Winstone) whose crystalline sound has the concentrated brilliance of sunlight on rippling water.

John Abercrombie was one of the principal players on 1977's "Deer Wan" and has also worked extensively with Holland, most notably in the Gateway band. His rapport with Peter Erskine has been developed inside the guitarist's freewheeling trio and on the drummer's records.

In short, the strengths of the group sound draw upon a complex web of associations.

Early in 1990, Kenny Wheeler reorganized his big band, making this quintet the hub of the 19-piece orchestra. ECM recorded this large ensemble in England on January 26 and 27 — the remarkable results of those recordings will be issued later this year — and then the quintet took off an 11-date European tour before landing in Oslo in mid-February for the "Widow" sessions. They had built up quite a head of steam along the way and in the Rainbow Studio recognized the need to brake a little, pulling back to avoid blurring the fundamentally reflective nature of the material. (Though the fabled "ECM sound" is, largely, a figment of journalistic fancy, a number of musicians who record for the label do share a clear-eyed understanding of the differing demands of the concert platform and the studio, and work accordingly.)

Peter Erskine sets the record's tone with his pensive sounding of tom-toms and kick-drum at the beginning of "Aspire". This tune, a reverie, makes its second ECM appearance here. Wheeler originally wrote the piece for George Adams's 1979 album "Sound Suggestions" (Dave Holland was the bassist on that date, too). Only cryptic crossword enthusiasts would be capable of puzzling it out, but "Aspire" is dedicated to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. A kirk, in Scotland, is a church. And a church has a spire. (Got it?) Wheeler was impressed, inspired, by Kirk's brave attempts to carry on playing in the aftermath of a stroke, the blind multi-instrumentalist inventing new techniques to compensate for partial paralysis. That kind of stoicism in the face of cruel circumstance was something to aspire to. It made most musicians' where-is-the-justice grumblings seem disagreeably self-pitying.

The theme of "Aspire" and Kenny's first, moving solo have qualities that seem to me archetypically Wheelerian in the curious admixture of melancholy and tensile strength. In the solo, two Wheelers seem to address each other, an immaculate lyricist and a freer player who won't allow the going to be merely prettily disconsolate...

The title of "Ma Belle Hélène", contains, gallicized, the names of Kenny's two sisters back in Canada. Clue: one of them got a namecheck on "Double, Double You". (The reader should now be able to decode without too much difficulty.) It's a sprightly, affectionate piece of music, Erskine's hi-hat chipper behind the solos of Abercrombie, Wheeler, Holland and Taylor, nudging the group along.

The album's centrepiece is perhaps "Ana", the longest cut here, dedicated to "two loved ones, one alive and one dead". This also has a rather curious history. The composition was written for Alex Schlippenbach's 17-strong Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra and recorded by ECM with this large group. (Release date: June, 1990.) Manfred Eicher was very taken with the composition and said, well, we have a strong orchestral "Ana", how about recording a chamber version with the quintet, too? Easier said than done. The original score of "Ana", described by Schlippenbach as "formidable", is some 86 densely-written pages long. Wheeler attacked his manuscript with an eraser and whittled it to its present form, which still manages to contain most of the main themes. It is fascinating to compare the two versions, the one authoritatively powerful, the other intimate, more gently persuasive. Listeners who enjoy the quintet rendition should make a point of getting hold of the BCJO record, too. The positive aspects of the present reading hardly require itemizing. There are many good things here. Holland's fine solo -concise, clear, intensely melodic; the sweetly-stinging way Abercrombie doubles the trumpet line on the heads or swerves around it; the sensitive exploration of free space once the pulse is dissolved in the section that precedes the final theme... I could go on, but the listener needs no such commentary to follow the action. Taylor's chording on the coda is interesting. In this recapitulation of the introductory piano melody he subtly transforms the original mood, making it sound, finally, much darker.

The title track, "The Widow In The Window" was first recorded on a hard-to-find Italian festival album, "Live At Roccella Ionica", on the tiny Ismez label in 1984, and has been put through several different treatments since, including a version with lyrics by Norma Winstone (broadcast in the UK, but not, thus far, released on record). John Taylor plays it with the assurance of a man who has lived with the tune awhile, developing his ideas in a long, elegantly flowing curve. Kenny's tone here is mournful almost to the point of sounding haunted, but, to say it again, ultimately buoyed up by a resiliency, a sound that's down but not defeated. There's a glimmer of defiance in the high-register cries he scatters through his otherwise stark, spare probings.

The anagrammatical "Hotel Le Hot" is almost straight-ahead postbop. Erskine's detailing of the rhythm keeps it sounding fresh (and the finesse of his solo brings home the point that his album title "Motion Poet" has been earned). Abercrombie, playing with so much restraint throughout the date, lets rip a little here, linearly inventive as ever, his guitar improvisations effortlessly fluid...

"Now, And Now Again", apparently named for the symmetry of its structure, is a perfectly formed, perfectly pretty ballad. They don't write them like that anymore, one thinks, lazily, before reflecting that "they" rarely ever did. If you wanted to find a tune that expressed a sense of peace as unsentimentally, where would you start to look?

You'd likely be brought back to an old Kenny Wheeler album and another track with an off-hand title like "Sumother Song" (I'm thinking of the first "movement" of that particular work.) For instance.

Slowly but with dogged persistence, Kenny Wheeler has defined his own music over the decades he's laboured in the background and foreground of modern jazz. It will never scream for your attention, it is altogether too mature for that, but it is a compendious music. There's a lot of history contained here, directly expressed or implied, and some very fine writing and improvising. "The Widow In The Window" should be savoured while anticipating the trumpeter/composer's large ensemble recordings. (About time we had further documentation of this area of Wheeler's activity; it's been seventeen years since the Incus big band album "Song for Someone".)

Somewhere behind the self-critical mask, Kenny Wheeler must believe this work worth the considerable effort and energy expended. What's clear is that, in his sixtieth year, he is playing marvellously, reconciling his "outside" and "inside" styles, still growing as a writer and performer. There's a lesson to be drawn from that, about the importance of tenaciousness. Some wise words of Henry Threadgill's come to mind: "The race is not given to the swift. It's the tortoise and the hare. That's what art is about. You can't win it unless you're in it. You've got to stay."

Steve Lake
April, 1990

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