The enterprising Edition label has released fine recently graduated UK composer Ralph Wyld’s debut album, a cool but very joined-up genre-crossing venture for an unusual lineup featuring his lustrous, Gary Burton-like vibraphone sound joined to brass, clarinets, a cello, and a hip and sophisticated rhythmic section, including bassist and fellow Kenny Wheeler jazz-prize winner Misha Mullov-Abbado. The late Kenny Wheeler’s music, with its gentle symmetries of short modulating motifs repeated by contrasting instruments, has an unmistakeable influence – but so do north-European ambient methods in the cello sighs, spacey ringing sounds and luminous vibraphone chords that populate the album’s two short interludes. There’s almost a Thelonious Monkish feel to the punchy, bass-prodding Cryptogram, with the leader’s vibes improv abandoning any hint of the inhibitions of jazz/classical hybrids as he squeezes swooping double-time lines into implausibly tight spaces. Wyld won two posh British jazz gongs in one year in 2015 – the Kenny Wheeler jazz prize, and the Dankworth prize for jazz composition – and in these tracks it’s pretty evident why.
