Long rated a pearl of post-bop jazz, Wheeler’s famous quartet session with Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette is here reissued on premium vinyl in what ECM calls its new audiophile Luminessence series. Great sound and sturdy gatefold packaging – which does full justice to Tadayuki Naito’s original cover photograph – are complemented by a fine text from trumpeter Nick Smart, head of jazz at the Royal Academy of Music and friend, colleague and biographer of Wheeler (1930–2014).
Playing glorious flugelhorn throughout, Wheeler was 45 when the (largely) extensive suites of Gnu High were recorded in New York in the summer of 1975. Despite earlier triumphs such as Windmill Tilter, which he recorded with the John Dankworth Orchestra in 1968, this was the first small-group album which Wheeler cut as a leader. It was also the last time that Keith Jarrett – superb throughout – would take a supporting role on a recording.
In an entry in the 1987 edition of Jazz: The Essential Companion Ian Carr suggests, most perceptively, that Wheeler’s writing and playing are characterised by “a kind of buoyant, romantic melancholy”. To confirm the acuity of the characterisation, sample here the five or so minutes of the deliciously sprung and developed Smatter. Those looking for more technical insight will find much to engage them in Smart’s reader-friendly essay.
Touching on Wheeler’s mid-life frustration that he felt he had been unable to develop an original voice within what he called the foundation that was bebop, Smart notes the creative impact of Booker Little on Wheeler around this time. Quoting perceptive remarks from Holland and DeJohnette about the session, he offers cogent pointers to the way in which, throughout Gnu High, Wheeler was able to open up his phrasing and develop a fresh balance between matters of thematic exposition and development, melody, harmony and rhythm; form and freedom, space, tone and time.
The result remains one of the finest group recordings in all jazz, the ever-flowing music projecting an exemplary plasticity of poetic, even painterly, expression. Unmissable!
Discography
Heyoke (21.47) – Smatter; Gnu Suite (18.51)
Wheeler (flh); Keith Jarrett (p); Dave Holland (b); Jack DeJohnette (d). New York, June 1975.
ECM 450 5346
