Charles Mingus and the Duke helped usher Stanton Wheeler into jazz heaven.
The jazz giants themselves weren’t on hand at the Yale Law School auditorium Sunday. But a big crowd of jazz-lovers — and friends of family of the late Stanton Wheeler — were there to hear their compositions, and many others, performed by four jazz combos with which the Wheeler regularly played.
The Reunion Jazz Ensemble… The King Street Stompers… The Yale Jazz Ensemble… The Clamdiggers… In between writing ground-breaking tracts on sociology and white-collar crime and teaching at the law school, Wheeler played with all these groups, following a muse that first visited him as a child in California.
Wheeler died in December at the age of 77. (Click here to read about that, and about his life.) Wheeler’s wife, Marcia Chambers (the Independent’s “Branford Eagle” columnist), and the rest of his community thought the most appropriate tribute to his passing would be to summon the sounds that made him swing.
And swing his former bandmates did on Sunday. Click on the play arrow above for a sample.