The Guardian

Title
Kenny Wheeler & Colours Jazz Orchestra, featuring Diana Torto; Massimo Morganti conductor

Author
John Fordham

Kenny Wheeler, the British Canadian-expat trumpeter and composer, was 77 when he made this album two years ago, but if time now marginally narrows his power (he plays more user-friendly flugelhorn throughout), his improvisations still sound like nobody else's - and his skills as a composer/arranger seem to be blossoming afresh. Wheeler has had a regular association with Italiy's accomplished Colours Jazz Orchestra, and he's the principal soloist and conceptual master of this fine session, featuring seven standards and one original. There's a recurring pattern, in which loose, often understated and time-juggling overtures evolve into grooving solo sections and then exultant finales, in which the orchestra is given a new set of rich collective variations on the original theme. But it never sounds like a formula, and the sonorities recall all kinds of large-scale jazz, from the Birth of the Cool music via Gil Evans to Maria Schneider. A new star in Wheeler's dark-blue firmament is Italian singer Diana Torto, a pure-toned virtuoso Wheeler deploys as he does Norma Winstone - as an unmannered lyrics singer, as an improvising instrument, and as an extra horn within collective jams.

www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/25/kenny-wheeler-nineteen-plus-one-review