One of the losses most keenly felt by jazz last year was that of composer, trumpeter and flugelhorn player Kenny Wheeler, who died in September aged 84.
In December 2013, Wheeler recorded a final album for the ECM label, Songs for Quintet. It was released on January 14, which would have marked his 85th birthday.
The Canadian-born Wheeler moved to Britain in 1952 and spent the rest of the decade establishing himself as a working jazz musician in London. His career reached a turning point when he joined the John Dankworth Orchestra in 1959, and having already made a name as an instrumentalist he began to study composition seriously.
Windmill Tilter, Wheeler's first extended work and based on the Don Quixote story, was recorded with the Dankworth Orchestra in 1968, and he continued to write for small and large ensembles while diversifying into free improvisation. He once said that everything he did had "a touch of melancholy and a touch of chaos to it", adding "I write sad songs and then I get the musicians to destroy them".
In practice that meant musicians who played Wheeler compositions under his leadership enjoyed the same freedom of expression he liked to exercise when playing other composers' music.
As a trumpeter and flugelhorn player, he was prized by many bandleaders in addition to Dankworth - among them Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Alan Skidmore, John Surman, Anthony Braxton and Tony Oxley. At home in a wide range of musical contexts, his playing on both types of horn was known for its warmth and lyricism, but also for its advanced harmonic thinking and occasional quirky unpredictability.
All those qualities made him a natural fit at Manfred Eicher's ECM label, founded in 1969, for which he began recording in 1975 as a leader and subsequently as a collaborator. He was also a member of the trio Azimuth, with pianist John Taylor and singer Norma Winstone, and when in Hong Kong in 1989 he contributed as a guest to the El Jammo album, made by Ric Halstead and Dave Packer's Kindred Spirits band featuring Eugene Pao and Rudi Balbuena.