Neville Young, Reporter
Some thoughts on communication: Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor work so well together that it’s almost uncanny. After about thirty years of partnership they must have built up some sort of telepathic link so that you’re not really getting two separate performers but a kind of symbiosis.
In this late night show we heard a handful of Wheeler’s own tunes and a couple by other composers. Wheeler, introduced by Laurie Frink as her “personal hero,” skipped effortlessly around tunes like Summer Night, Pure and Simple, and Between Moons. He’s got such technical facility that you sort of forget he’s playing an instrument at all – it just slips into a kind of musical flow, singing along effortlessly. There are extremes of range here but you don’t really register them as such – it’s just part of the flow, the peaks, and troughs understated rather than hammered out at you. 
For about half the program Wheeler was playing a beautiful flugelhorn in a brushed silver finish. He makes this wonderful broad, clear, warm sound with just a slight halo of breathiness round the edges which diminishes as he goes higher. For the rest of the program, on his Smith-Watkins trumpet the tone is more direct, as you’d expect, but it never turns harsh, retaining its warm and slightly veiled sound always.
Taylor is an incredible pianist. When he’s backing solos it’s so neat and sympathetic, but when it’s his solo – just incredible. He goes off into structures of such fascinating complexity that if you could capture it you could bottle it up and sell it as piano sonatas. It’s original, imaginative, intriguing. Oh, and the stuff he did inside the piano was brilliant. There were a couple of moments of this and it was wonderful. On one occasion Wheeler played loud notes into the piano, with pedal down, so that sympathetic vibration started it ringing and building into an other-worldly chord, then Taylor started plucking individual notes to pick out the harmony. In another moment in Sky Ice, Taylor started a fantastic rhythm up inside the piano, combining stroking across a range of strings with slapping and tapping so that I could have sworn there was a whole band in there. Does this sound pretentious? It wasn’t, it was just great music, you had to be there.
Between Moons is a beautiful, plaintive melody, which featured well measured, paced improvisations from Wheeler. He starts with such space and poise, and builds a structure that gives him room for the pyrotechnics later, but it’s so well thought-out that it just all seems to fit in naturally.
It was a great evening. Maybe a bit late, following the Black Dyke concert, but the RNCM had gone to great lengths to conjure an intimate atmosphere, and the audience, despite thinning out a little as it got later, seemed to go home happy. I did – it was a memorable concert and one which I felt privileged to attend.
