The Arrival of Kneebody
June 15th, 2005
The next major quake to hit LA may have less to do with shifting tectonic plates than with a crackling quintet thundering up the jazz charts with a powerhouse collection, at once challenging and accessible. Kneebody’s eponymous album floats like an iron butterfly and stings like a diesel. “It’s got a lot of testosterone. It’s a very energetic sonic experience,” says resident reedist Ben Wendel. And while their unique soul-jazz-on-steroids sound captures a growing cadre of Knee-heads, their beautifully crafted melodic ballads, and moody impressionistic sketches are the guilty secret.
Formed by Wendel, drummer Nate Wood, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, trumpeter Shane Endsley, and keyboardist Adam Benjamin, Kneebody runs jazz through a broad collective musical background to create a remarkably potent blend whose primary flavor remains jazz. “I’ve been describing our music as hybrid music,” Wendel explains. “We’re musicians that have have absorbed a lot of different styles of music. We’re just trying to make music that is an amalgamation of what’s around us now, just like everybody’s done from whatever era they’re coming up from. So, this music is a hybrid of all the tastes we like.”
“The cool thing about this band is, everyone in the band writes and everyone has a distinct voice,” enthuses Wendel. “Not everyone in this band is coming primarily from a jazz background. Everybody’s coming from different places. We’ve all studied jazz, we all understand the language and are able to express the complexity of jazz. But then, as much as we love jazz, everybody also has equal interests in other genres of music. In my own background, my mom was an opera singer for 25 years. She sang with LA Opera. Different sounds, different sections, it’s like the process of five different musical viewpoints coming together. This band is a leaderless band. This is an equal parts ownership kind of group.”
Keyboard player Adam Benjamin agrees. “It’s such a fundamental part of our music that any of us can control the direction of it at anytime, which is why I think our live show is pretty consistent. On any given night there’s going to be one or two of us that really feel strong enough and confident enough and creative enough to do a lot of the leading. You never really know who it’s going to be in a particular song. It’s really exciting.”
“It’s a very energetic thing, especially live. The last few tours we’ve been really having fun. I think that Nate, Kaveh, and I as a rhythm section, especially with Kaveh and I playing a lot of electronics and effected sounds, really try to think of it as though we’re one unit of sound. Often it’s difficult even for us to tell with particular tones, who in the band it’s coming from. That’s really what we aim for, something where we could really get outside of our established personalities as jazz musicians and form a real identity as a band which we fit into in a very particular way.”
A listen to Kneebody, only the second release on Dave Douglas’ new label, Greenleaf, gives clear context to the musicians’ infectious enthusiasm. In the course of 12 original songs, Kneebody makes a strong case for their ear-loving take on 21st century jazz.
“You can’t escape the instrumentation,” says Wendel, “it’s a jazz quintet. But we’re not playing the traditional music you would associate with a jazz quintet. It’s funny how things change over time. I’m playing an instrument from the 1960’s. He’s playing something else, those same instruments were playing completely different music 50 years ago than they are now. It’s kind of fun that way. I like how music inevitably evolves to fit the sounds around it.
“We didn’t know how people were going to react to this music because obviously it’s not like swing. But it’s been positive. I think regardless of what people enjoy aesthetically, it’s hard to deny music that’s good on an energetic and technical level. These compositions are complex but accessible and you can tell everyone in the band is trained and studied this music. So, for someone just listening to it, or even for a more traditional hardcore jazz fan, generally they have a positive reaction hearing this band.”
They’ve honed their obvious rapport through a lengthy association. “I had gone to Eastman with Ben and Kaveh,” recalls Benjamin. “I transferred out of Eastman to CalArts, meant Nate and the whole year I was at CalArts I had this idea of putting the four of us together, because I think it matched up really well stylistically. Luckily it ended up that Ben and Kaveh decided to move to LA after graduating Eastman. Nate was staying here to finish up school and had already been working here a lot. So, we really got to do a lot of regular playing early on, before we even really took the band seriously. We played weekly at a coffee shop at UCLA, later on weekly at the Temple Bar. It was a year or so before we really felt there was a chemistry there, which is strange. Once it hit then we really got excited about composing music for our personalities and developing this new style.”
“That was the inception,” continues Wendel. “The initial group was all of us minus the trumpet player. We got a residency at the Temple Bar. That was just when the Temple Bar opened, so about 2000 and it was about a year long residency, and that’s when that stuff developed. Until the release of this album, all that we had to sell on tour was this Wendel album and Shane’s album which is essentially all the same players playing this music which is our sound, but nothing that actually had the name ‘Kneebody’ on it. It was kind of confusing at first, so we’re glad to finally have something out there that’s very clear.
“Dave [Douglas] came through Shane. He’s the guy in the band who lives in New York. Dave has this yearly thing called the FONT Festival, Festival Of New Trumpets. Basically, it’s a residency at club there called Tonic. Basically, he books the month and brings in different trumpet players that he likes to do their music. He brought in Shane, and we ended up having a tour around that time. It was Kneebody that played. He talked to Shane, he said I’m leaving RCA, I’m going to start this label, do you have anything ready to go, are interested in getting involved? It was just the timing, we had this album basically ready to go. We sent Dave the rough mixes, and he loved it. It’s cool because he’s like the dream record label owner, because he’s very supportive and very interactive. He in no way tries to affect creative control. So, we were able to do this album completely how we wanted to do it. He’s been a great supporter, it’s been wonderful in that way.”
The resulting album experienced a number of changes in its three years of development. “Theoretically, we’re coming out of the jazz thing,” says Wendel, “but in terms of how long it took to record the record it’s almost like we’re a rock band. That record was recorded here and there over a period of three years. It’s just one of those things, we’ve been consistently touring through that whole time. Everybody in the band outside of the band plays in a bunch of other groups and with other touring artists. So it’s this thing where, whenever we had a chance to go into the studio for a day or two we would track stuff, and then over the period of those three years certain material would get old, other stuff had to be mixed. Just one of those things. Then, the Dave Douglas opportunity came up, and thankfully we basically had an album’s worth of material at that point ready to go.”
“We’re glad it’s finally out,” says Benjamin, “it took us a long time to finally make it what we wanted to. We ended up with two, maybe three records worth of material. We were eliminating stuff as fast as we were recording it. It took us three years to get both the product we wanted and the right venue to release it. We have five or six full completely done songs that I think are great, but just didn’t quite fit into the album as it was. I really hope we find something to do with them at some point.”
“That’s been the other cool thing,” says Wendel, “it’s an independent label, but they have distribution through Koch. It’s everywhere, all over the country. It’s in Tower Records, Virgin Records. A friend of mine just came off tour and said he saw our album in Idaho! We were featured on NPR’s Weekend America last weekend, and we just got notification we’ve gone from #33 to #25 on the CMJ jazz charts. There’s stations all over the country rotating the album.”
Their growing popularity and the freshness of their sound makes them prime targets for the Acolytes of the Sacred Jazz Flame. “I think it’s a natural thing in society in general that at a certain point a musical genre becomes codified and it becomes a museum piece.” Wendel observes. “It’s human nature to put things in a museum., which is fine. I’m ecstatic that symphonies still exist, that we still hear music that’s 400 years old. That’s the thing about jazz in the biggest sense of the word. To me, jazz is not a specific era, like the fifties or the sixties. It’s the concept of improvising, which in one way has been around forever, but in another way was a brand new sound that happened in the last hundred years. In that sense, the idea of human interaction through music and spontaneity, that’s what we want to carry on, the spirit of what I perceive jazz to be. I think a music is not alive unless people are showing up.
“On all these tours we do clinics. We go to schools from jr high, to high school to colleges, we play with these kids and we have them play with us. And sometimes, we’ll do club dates where we’ll teach the kids one of our songs and then they’ll come to the club and play with us. It’s really fun because they have such a great open energy. They’re not jaded in any way. I think that’s the other way the music is going to carry on, for musicians to pass on the torch to the younger kids. I even remember in high school the few times that a clinician would come in and show what he does and even coach the band. You don’t forget those experiences, they have an impact.”
“It’s a big part of our touring,” says Benjamin. “At first, we came up with that mostly as a financial mechanism to finance our tours before we could get significant enough guarantees at clubs to really go on the road and make money from that. But now, over the years it’s actually developed into a pretty big part of the identity of the band. I can’t really picture going on tour with Kneebody without getting up at 7 in the morning to go to some high school or college on most days. It keeps us in touch with the fundamental aspects of music to have to present it ot a new audience and explain it in certain ways, and literally bring people into it. Have people learn the material and play with us, tryout some of our concepts kind of keeps us constantly reinventing the band, keeping a fresh attitude towards it.”
After the years of hard work and determination, the members of Kneebody know their on to something special. “It’s got an intellectual aspect to it, and it’s complex music,” says Wendel, “but we don’t want it to be something that only musicians can enjoy. Music is music. The more you play the more you realize that that’s kind of a special thing that doesn’t happen all the time, a sort of immediate natural level of communication. We said let’s keep going with this because it was fun.”
Benjamin agrees: “I think we all feel that way, especially living out in Los Angeles there’s not a lot of bands doing similar things. When we go to New York City there’s more of a feeling of kinship with a number of bands, and there’s a movement in music we fit into in a certain kind of way. We dreamed for years coming up through music school of having a band where we could play energetic music that was truly ours and really fun to play, but that was unique and had something to say, and really get a chance to perform with it and take it one the road. I think to get to the point that we have with this record makes us feel very fortunate. We’ve been pushing hard with this band for 5 years now, it’s nice to get some rewards back from it. We’re hoping that in terms of not compromising it’ll end up making the music more soulful and from our hearts, so that in that way it will become actually more accessible even though it’ll be a little harder to classify.”
All About Jazz – Rex Butters
Review : Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
December 13th, 2005
Breaking the Mold – Flatlands Collective, Kneebody spin jazz in opposite directions.
Like fire and ice, the two emerging bands that played Wednesday night at HotHouse hardly could have been more diametrically opposed.
Yet despite stylistic differences, they shared at least one critical trait: Each was determined to toss jazz convention to the winds and did so with unmistakable eloquence.
Dutch saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra created the Flatlands Collective not long after he moved to to the U.S. in 2002 and began collaborating with Chicago musicians. But if the Midwest’s topography inspired the name of the band, it had scant effect on the nature of Dijkstra’s music, which was anything but flat.
Richly textured, subtly nuanced and built on multiple layers of melody, the music of the Collective merged the free-thinking nature of the Chicago avant-garde with elements of contemporary European classical composition. Much of this music suggested an intensely cerebral exercise, with carefully engineered stop-start rhythms, delicate dabs of electronically produced sound and a nearly complete avoidance of a straightforward beat.
When the band ventured into the occasional swing passage, one was startled to hear it, since practically everything else about this ensemble steered clear of the jazz mainstream.
If at first the music sounded so diffuse and muted as to lack coherence, before long the repertoire became more lucid and structured (or did our ears simply become adjusted to its aesthetic?). The other-worldly hums and drones that Dijkstra produced on lyricon, which might be described as a kind of digital clarinet wired to a computer, were answered by pungent bursts of dissonance from the rest of the band in a piece titled “Slitch.”
And in the last work of the set, “Dipje,” the band produced the exquisite blends of instrumental color one might sooner expect from a classical chamber ensemble.
In the end, the Flatlands Collective linked the intellectual firepower of the Dutch free-jazz scene with the instrumental virtuosity of some of Chicago’s most accomplished creative improvisers, including trombonist Jeb Bishop and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm.
Though the band still must be considered a work-in-progress, it deserves respect for the unorthodox musical direction it’s pursuing.
If the Flatlands Collective aimed for a studious brand of jazz, the comparably adventurous Kneebody–making its Chicago debut–strove for a much more visceral, accessible, beat-driven sound. Though not exactly dance music, the band’s rock-tinged backbeats, back-to-basics riffs and motor-rhythm passages suggested it was playing for an audience that approaches jazz from a pop perspective.
Even so, there was much more here than a casual listening might suggest. Just when the band seemed to be sinking into a rhythmic groove, it sabotaged expectations by changing or suspending its tempo or meter. And by juicing up its acoustic work with keyboard electronics and other computer-processed sound, Kneebody italicized its every gesture.
Some of the most impressive work came from keyboardist Adam Benjamin, who produced a galaxy of space-age sound, while trumpeter Shane Endsley and tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel formed a taut and muscular front line.
-Howard Reich