Westword “Alter Ego”
August 8th, 2004
Denver-born trumpeter Shane Endsley migrated this summer from balmy, laid-back Los Angeles to dense, teeming Brooklyn so he can be closer to his fiance — and to New York’s fertile experimental-music scene. For some people, such a move might have been a shock to the system. But at age 27, Endsley has already learned to live with (and to love) abrupt changes of tone and temper in his life. Witness the astonishing variety of his early musical experiences: Since graduating from the prestigious Eastman School of Music in the late ’90s, he’s toured the United States and Europe with anarchist folkie Ani DiFranco, recorded three CDs as a sideman to M-base founder Steve Coleman and burned a fourth, Between Tangents, with second-generation jazz innovator Ravi Coltrane. Through Colorado-based trumpeter Hugh Ragin, he met and played with free-jazz icon David Murray.
The L.A.-based sextet Endsley founded a year ago with fellow Eastman alum and saxophonist Ben Wendel, the Wendel-Endsley Group, reflects a similar bombardment of influences. Endsley, Wendel and keyboard player Adam Benjamin all come from jazz roots. (The saxophonist has worked with Dave Holland and Billy Higgins, among others; the pianist’s hungers took him from 91-year-old alto giant Benny Carter to avant-bassist Charlie Haden.) By contrast, drummer Scott Seiver — also a Denver native — has played and/or toured with members of Bad Brains, Fishbone and Pearl Jam. Percussionist Davey Chegwidden appeared on Macy Gray’s first two albums and works with the hip-hop orchestra DAKAH. Electric and acoustic bassist Kaveh Rastegar, a third Denverite who also attended Eastman, has worked with rockers as divergent as Tre Hardson (Pharcyde), Fish (Fishbone) and Mike Andrews (the Grey-Boy Allstars) while maintaining a parallel identity as a staffer at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.
How do young musicians this diverse get a collective identity together?
“We just put one foot in front of the other and move slowly,” Endsley says. “It’s very personal, and sometimes it’s very hard, but we share a broad aesthetic, employing many aspects of different musical genres. The challenge was to find a middle ground and do something that is both original and hard to define — a compilation of all our experiences.”
The results, for now, include a self-produced CD called 2nd Guess, which is beginning to attract attention in the L.A. and New York undergrounds, and a new tour that will take the Wendel-Endsley Group, whose home base until now has been L.A. (specifically, Santa Monica’s funky Temple Bar), to the North Beach Jazz Festival in San Francisco, back to L.A. and on to Denver. The ensemble will appear — minus percussionist Chegwidden — Monday night in City Park and Tuesday on the newly installed bandstand at Dazzle Supper Club.
As you might expect, the group’s challenging music ignores genre borders and defies easy categorization. Jazz-based but stylistically fluid, tunes like “Veiled Heart” and “After the Snakepit” boldly throw funk, groove, alternative rock, hip-hop and assorted electronica variations into the mix in what, for lack of a better term, the musicians call “future instrumental jazz.” “Actually, we’re discovering the philosophy of the group as we go along,” Endsley says. “All of us work with other bands, too, but this group is like a church we can go to. This is our heart. Some of the other music we play [individually] is not always so gratifying. This group is where we can produce new combinations of elements and new forms. We think orchestrally and tend to be compositional, but we improvise when there’s a need. What we hope to do is make each song a new event each time, to alter the journey every time for the listener as we try to reconcile many different ideas.”
Fellow musicians have started to take notice. Endsley’s friends Coleman and Coltrane are talking the group up in New York, and jazzmen, in particular, have praised their multifaceted fusion of styles. Guitarist Mike Cain: “Passion combined with intellect to form wonderful musical vibrations.” Pianist and composer James Carney: “The Wendel-Endsley Group is a passionate collective of high-caliber, forward-thinking musicians who dependably exude a pleasing blend of cathartic edginess and dynamic subtlety.”
For Endsley, it was almost inevitable that he would be a player. His mother, Pamela, is principal flutist with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. His father, Gerald, a trumpeter, music publisher and the longtime director of the Denver Municipal Band, was his first instructor. While a teenager going to East High School, Shane was also deeply influenced by Denver jazz trumpeter Ron Miles (“I still try not to sound too much like him”) and mentored by two fine local jazz pianists: Ron Jolley taught him theory and harmony; Boulder’s Art Lande gave him “some tools that I’ll use for the rest of my life.”
That history makes next week’s homecoming (their second one this year) all the more important for Endsley and fellow Denverites Seiver and Rastegar. “We’re very excited about coming home, and we’re proud to bring this band back,” the trumpeter says. “It’s something we’ve worked hard with and something we believe in.”
Indeed, Endsley took $15,000 worth of belief out of his own pocket — earnings from his year-long tour with DiFranco — to finance 2nd Guess, and he says he’ll be content even if he never gets another dime back from the 1,000-copy CD run. “I’m very happy with it. Most of the tracking was done in a week, but the overdubs and the mixing took months. It’s hard to retain your perspective over that period of time, being totally immersed in the project, but once it was finally done, new ideas started coming in a rush. I expect the band will now go in some new directions.”
That means Endsley will have to go West once in a while. Living in Brooklyn while his bandmates remain in Los Angeles is a huge obstacle, but he means to overcome it. “I’ll have to get smart with my frequent-flyer miles,” he says, “and we’ll play more periodically, booking our jobs in bunches. But we believe in our resources and our dedication. Staying together will be daunting, but we can do it. We may even get up a new head of steam through my old New York friends.”
Meanwhile, the band is looking for a new name that more accurately reflects its collaborative ways. While Endsley has been the group’s primary composer for the last year, the other members have increasingly brought new ideas to bear in recent months. “With the new tour, we’ll be playing new music,” he explains. “You know, we learned quite a bit about the music business itself in Los Angeles. It can be pretty intense. The bands on major labels are in a larger corporate channel, and that can consume the music itself. You become aware of the vacuum; you can get passed by. Our kind of music is not heard much in L.A., so for us it’s sometimes been like circling the wagons in the middle of a storm.”
Or going to church.
by: Bill Gallo
Rocky Mountain News
Rocky Mountain News
October 23rd, 2004
“Role of swanky urban jazz venue suits Dazzle”
Before the Denver School of the Arts launched in 1991, East High was considered the city’s flagship school for performing arts.Graduates included Ron Miles, Don Cheadle, Pam Grier and Antoinette Perry (the namesake of the Tony Awards), to name a few. In my four years there, I saw a saxophonist awarded a full ride to Berklee Boston, a bassoonist with perfect pitch who went on to Julliard, and a trumpeter named Shane Endsley. Endsley’s dedication and the maturity in which he approached his instrument- two qualities that continue to buoy his climb into the upper ranks of new young lions in the jazz world- set him apart. Endsley’s recent accolades have included recording with Art Lande and Ravi Coltrane and touring with Ani Difranco. He’s focused on his own project now, a group called Kneebody, a genre-defying quintet steeped in the musical landscape of the past few decades. Blending equal parts jazz, hip-hop, and rock, and flavoring it all with hints of folk, Americana, and a few foreign influences, Kneebody is and all-original exercise in contemporary musical exploration. And it rocks. So when I heard they were in town and playing at Dazzle, I quickly phoned The German and told him to keep that Friday night open. An East graduate himself (notice a pattern here?), The German was only too excited for the opportunity to catch up with an old friend and see a good show. We were not disappointed. Ever since the powers that be at Dazzle learned that they could carve a niche as a swanky urban jazz venue, things have been on the up. Dazzle has managed to provide a destination where jazz traditionalists and experimentalists can alternately succeed, with neither group suffering in draw to the other. A rare juxtaposition, it suggests that Denver’s musical tastes may not be a complete loss after all. Certainly the jazz fans are an educated bunch (I’ll tip my hat to KUVO-FM (89.3) for that one). The interior of the club is beset with deep blues and rich reds, and the sultry lighting gives everything a touch more panache. The bar/lounge area provides an elegant mingling environment while the larger dining room off to the side showcases the stage. And it was on that stage that Kneebody captivated us for two hours. With the exception of one table of misfits, the entire room sat enraptured by the collective improvisations and dynamic shifts that Kneebody expertly weaved. There was plenty of room for open solos, but I would never have likened this group to a “jam band”. For one thing, any of the soloists, whether it be Endsley, saxophonist Ben Wendel, keyboardist Adam Benjamin or even bassist Kaveh Rastegar, knew when to stop and how to utilize space. Secondly, all the solos seemed so well-honed that they appeared to be a natural extension of the song itself. Most importantly, it never got boring.
- Dave Flomberg