jazz marlbank marlbank

‘Blue Nile,’ ‘You’ve Read the Book’ and ‘Kind Folk’ are the tracks you can listen to right now on Bandcamp anyway. It doesn’t seem to be on Spotify.

Another case, another context, of present past

While Angel Song was recorded in New York less than 5 months after the Evan Parker produced What Was, it was then issued a year later. But it’s taken far longer – more than 30 years – for What Was to finally see the light of day. It’s apt somehow that Angel Song even had a Wheeler tune on it called ‘Present Past’ (another one on the same album flips the words as if to also swim in a T. S. Eliot Four Quartets universe). Curiously also fitting all this because Wheeler’s music manages to defeat the ravages of time and neglect to remain relevant to the present beyond the grave defeating any notion of pastness. This upcoming release on the Kent based avant label False Walls amounts to still more proof.

Recorded at the Gateway studio in Kingston, south west London, Wheeler biographer Nick Smart pins the session down to taking place a short time before Wheeler’s classic Angel Song. “On What Was,” Smart says, “we hear Kenny at 65 years old and still at the height of his musical powers.”