‘Kenny Wheeler: Suite For Hard Rubber Orchestra’ Out Now
September 17, 2018 BY Nettwerk
Out now via Justin Time and Nettwerk Records, Kenny Wheeler: Suite for Hard Rubber Orchestra represents the final large work by the famed Canadian jazz composer Kenny Wheeler and features long-time friend and vocal collaborator, Norma Winstone, performing with Vancouver’s acclaimed jazz ensemble The Hard Rubber Orchestra. 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 Winstone’s voice, who brings her timelessly ethereal sound to Kenny’s swan song.
Wheeler’s manuscript contained a work in five movements but in no particular order, leaving the sequencing to the ensemble. On this recording, they are interspersed with improvisations featuring Brad Turner, who’s searching, intervallic approach to the trumpet is deeply informed by Kenny’s profound contributions to the instrument.
As a founding patron of the London’s Royal Academy of Music’s Junior Jazz school for teenagers, Wheeler was born in Toronto and began playing trumpet at the age of 12. He studied at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and in the early 1950s, moved to London where he lived until his death in 2014. Prolific, the influential composer, trumpet and flugelhorn player wrote well into his 80s and some of his themes – poignant, softly falling melodies such as “Everybody’s Song But My Own” and “Kind Folk” have become jazz standards. Over his lifetime, he has collaborated and/or performed with David Sylvian, Steve Swallow, John Taylor, Paul Bley, Bill Frisell and Joni Mitchell, to name a few.
Track List:
- Movement I (fat. Norma Winstone)
- Improvisation I
- Movement II (feat. Norma Winstone)
- Movement III (feat. Norma Winstone)
- Improvisation II
- Movement IV (feat. Norma Winstone)
- Improvisation III
- Movement V (feat. Norma Winstone)
For more information on Justin Time, please visit www.justin-time.com.
