The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and trumpeters Nick Smart and John Daversa. The pair produced Some Days Are Better: The Lost Scores, a Royal Academy of Music- and Frost School of Music-led project dubbed Kenny Wheeler Legacy. True to the name, they pay tribute to the renowned trumpeter, flugelhornist, and composer.
Aside from Smart and Daversa, Some Days are Better features high-profile soloists in singer Norma Winstone; saxophonists Chris Potter and Evan Parker; trumpeters Brian Lynch, Ingrid Jensen, Etienne Charles, and James Copus; and pianist Shelly Berg.
The album will be released on 31 January via Greenleaf Music, in conjunction with Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler, a biography by Smart and fellow trumpeter Brian Shaw, out 1 February via Equinox Books. Links to purchase the album, and to Smart and Daversa’s websites, can be found at the end of this article.
Yes: among heads, Kenny Wheeler is unbelievably renowned, in both the post-bop and free realms. But head-dom can easily lead to pigeonholing, especially since the Canadian great staked his claim in the UK jazz scene from the ‘50s until his death in 2014.
“This isn’t someone who was only a really good UK jazz musician,” Nick Smart tells UK Jazz News. He cites the estimable contributors to his and Brian Shaw’s biography of Wheeler: the likes of Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Chris Potter, Maria Schneider, Ingrid Jensen, Vince Mendoza, Steve Coleman, Aaron Parks.
“Kenny Wheeler is an absolutely global, huge figure,” he continues. “This project isn’t about fandom; it’s about legacy. And a legacy is most meaningful when it transcends the mere musical content that the person leaves behind, and becomes a fundamentally human story. And Kenny’s story is one of such triumph over adversity.”
All of that is detailed in the book. For now, dive into the impetus behind, and execution of, this attendant musical tribute, which arrives following what would be Wheeler’s 95th birthday: 14 January.
UK Jazz News: What are your histories with Kenny Wheeler and/or his music?
Nick Smart: Did you meet Kenny, John?
John Daversa: I never did. For me, he’s one of those people that you meet through the music; that’s my relationship with him. When it’s someone who you’re very close to, and you’re very intimate, and you’ve never met this person, it’s such an interesting relationship. Like a Charlie Parker or a Wolfgang Mozart.
Nick Smart: I was ever so close to Kenny in about the last 15 years of his life. He meant a lot to me, as a mentor, a close friend and a kind of surrogate musical grandfather. Professionally, I helped manage the last stages of his career, when his son [Mark] and I looked after the last few bookings he had, and things like that.
While he was still alive, I secured the archive of his manuscripts to come into the Royal Academy’s Museum Collections, and I also started writing his biography with Brian Shaw.
When he was in the care home at the end of his life, he knew that we were writing this biography, and was pleased about it. He was typically a little bemused that anyone would be interested in his story, but he was pleased it was us doing it, and we had the full family support. I still remain close with the family.
JD: Kenny Wheeler is an original. He’s an original voice as a writer and improviser. It just so happens that he plays the trumpet, you know.
[Discovering him], I recognised how much I value originality, musically. The way that he played, he was searching for something – nobody knows what! In the writing, it was this passionate search as well, taking us to new territory, an environment that would hold a space for new improvising.

UKJN: Did you get all the interviews you needed before he passed?
NS: Yes, I did a whole bunch with him in 2010, actually before I even knew we were going to write the book. I just had this feeling that there were a lot of stories that needed capturing.
Naïvely, I didn’t know how many interviews he had already done, and how accessible they were. I subsequently found out that there were some really wonderful, substantial interviews from the peak of his career, but I still got a lot of hugely useful stuff straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.
The biography is a story of his journey, and his personality, and how entwined it is with the music he made.
UKJN: How so?
NS: This legacy project that John and I have completed really captures the most interesting bit of that story, which is related to your question.
Kenny was very shy, and full of self-doubt, and self-deprecating. But paradoxically, he also had this kind of inner strength that can’t come from a place of reticence, but the humility bordering on self-doubt was absolutely real for him.
As a result, he was a late starter in his bandleading career. If we think of people who’ve begun their solo careers later in life, I don’t think there are many as late as Kenny. He was 38 when he recorded his first record as a leader, but even that one [Windmill Tilter] was for somebody else’s band. His first true record as a leader was at the age of 43.
This period is about him really finding himself, and it’s through the combination of straight-ahead jazz playing, his love for free improvisation, and then the commercial brass studio playing that he was doing.
So, the music that John and I have recorded with Frost and the Academy is from the very first period of his jazz orchestra, where he’s really bringing those elements together – and his life kind of embodies those three elements.
UKJN: With the premise of the project solidified, how did you begin to build the album?
JD: Nick and Dave Holland came to guest [at the Frost School] in January 2018, and they did Long Suite 2005, from his 75th birthday. That was our first immersion together into a project like that. We started talking about how we had to do something else together, and collaborate. Then, I found out that Nick was doing all of this work with the Kenny Wheeler estate, and Wheeler’s music, and we started to think, Could we collaborate on this? How wonderful would it be for our students to collaborate on a project like this, on a large scale? So, it just unfolded from there.