It’s less than two years since trumpeter-flugelhornist-composer Kenny Wheeler passed away. But his music lives on in a number of quite different ways, for instance an album due in the autumn that goes some way to indicate the mood and setting that Wheeler did so much to create and inhabit, and in a new biography.

Turning to the first of these and a highly thoughtful and skilfully executed ‘Wheeler world’-type chamber jazz album called Blackwater (**** RECOMMENDED), due for release on the Jellymould label by bassist Henrik Jensen, leading an exquisitely poised quartet, in which the musical character and style of Wheeler is inescapably present quite probably not even intentionally in the delicately pastoral, communicative, slightly mournful solo lines of trumpeter/flugel player Andre Canniere and overall direction of Jensen’s rewarding compositions that emerge butterfly-like out of a melancholic dream. The quartet, completed by pianist Esben Tjalve and drummer Antonio Fusco, are collectively known as Followed By Thirteen. In the exacting sound of Jensen, who comes originally from Denmark and studied jazz at the Royal Academy of Music (like that other significant Anglophile of a fellow Dane and bassist Jasper Høiby), it’s hard not to think of the giant influence of Dave Holland, Wheeler’s great friend, newly announced as an NEA Jazz Master in the States.

We have to wait a bit longer but in 2017 the second significant and less oblique Wheeler-related event is the publication of a book on Wheeler called Song for Someone: The Musical Life of Kenny Wheeler by US academic Brian Shaw and Nick Smart who heads up jazz at the Royal Academy of Music that encompasses “Wheeler’s sudden move from Canada to England, early success with John Dankworth, international recognition through associations with ECM and Dave Holland, and eventual acknowledgement as one of the great jazz performer/composers of the twentieth century,” say publisher Equinox. Stephen Graham

Jensen, Canniere and Tjalve, playing live with their former drummer Peter Ibbetson from earlier album Qualia, above