Jazz
“Vital Spark (Music of Kenny Wheeler)” is back in print on CD: Edition Records have reissued it, and it went on sale on 22 September. The record itself came out on 20 February this year.
It’s led by bassist Dave Holland, singer Norma Winstone and the London Vocal Project directed by Pete Churchill, with saxophonist Mark Lockheart and pianist Nikki Iles. The material is the last compositions Wheeler — the Canadian trumpeter and flugelhorn player based in the UK since the 1950s — kept sending Churchill; there are new lyrics by Winstone and settings Wheeler himself had made of poems by Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll, Langston Hughes and William Blake.
Winstone and Holland both come to this from a long way back: she sang with Wheeler for over two decades in the trio Azimuth, alongside pianist John Taylor, and he had him on his quintet across a run of ECM records in the eighties. Wheeler died in London on 18 September 2014, aged 84. The words Winstone sings, she wrote after his death, to music its composer would never hear.
Text by Aina Torrents