Kenny Wheeler 80th Birthday | Jazz review

Royal Academy of MusicAs a unique improviser, and as a ­composer and arranger on a par with Gil Evans, Kenny Wheeler has been revered since the 1960s. Yet the shy Canadian trumpeter told me five years ago: "I'm not a composer, I'm somebody who takes pretty songs and joins them up." Wheeler's 80th birthday concert, hosted by the Royal Academy of Music, showed what an understatement that was.Wheeler's evocative big-band ­writing, with its purple-hued palette of slow-build melodies, ­shift...

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