For jazz, next wave could be Kneebody
August 8th, 2007
Richard Scheinin, Mercury News (link)
A century after Buddy Bolden, where does jazz go? After swing, bop, cool, modal, free, fusion, M-base, and a slew of other mini-movements, where now?
Kneebody has been thinking about this. The young electric quintet, four-fifths of which is from L.A., with one member winging in from New York, is something of a rock band with jazz chops and a classical obsession with structure. There are few extended solos; so long, Coltrane. Instead, there’s a steady collective improvisation in which the whole musical environment – the key, the tempo, the texture – keeps shifting, often on a dime.
If that sounds brainy, it is. But it’s handled with such apparent ease and infused with such thrashing grooves that it should be only a matter of time before Kneebody breaks through to a wider audience. Wednesday night at Stanford University’s Campbell Recital Hall, a couple hundred cheering listeners, many of them teenagers attending the Stanford Jazz Workshop’s summer camp, couldn’t get enough of the group.
Mostly, I think, that was because of Kneebody’s focus on rhythm. Drummer Nate Wood can take the weirdest tempo imaginable and make it sound like a tribal-punk call to the mosh pit. He is rhythmically conjoined not only with electric bassist Kaveh Rastegar and keyboardist Adam Benjamin but also with saxophonist Ben Wendel and trumpeter Shane Endsley, whose syncopated melodies, hocketing riffs and quick, concentrated solos fuel the rhythmic boil.
also Kneebody’s focus on tunes, some of which last only three or four minutes. Within that time frame, the band moves from compositional signpost to signpost, while the players feed one another musical cues that trigger instantaneous changes of volume, key, orchestration and tempo. It’s as if a switch has been pulled, pointing the group toward its next destination.
The concert, part of the Stanford Jazz Festival, included Endsley’s “Blue, Yellow, White,” which built off a stuttering melody, rocketed up with a quick solo from the trumpeter, landed a moment later in 1975, with Wood bashing out an electric-funk groove on his cymbals (the type Al Foster used to play with Miles Davis), suddenly slowed way down with trumpet and saxophone playing a unison mantra-riff, and kept on morphing.
“Flood on 12th Street,” also by Endsley (the New Yorker in the band), had trumpet and saxophone floating, like Miles and Wayne Shorter in ’68, through a Radiohead landscape, then turned into a nervous rock-out. Benjamin’s “Unforeseen Influences” had a hip-hop coda. His “Roll” was bouncy, droll and detached, with a nifty little melody and chord progression; Wes Anderson should stick it in one of his films.
Awash with electronic effects (everyone except Wood is outfitted with foot pedals, switchboards, assorted gear), the music stayed in flux. For me, an old jazzer, it changed gears too often, skipping from place to place without adequately exploring the intervening territories. I wanted more solos (Endsley’s a beautiful trumpeter; fat tone, clean lines), more grit and intensity.
But for this band, the exploration seems to be in the process, the controlled flux, the commitment to change. Maybe it’s time for old jazzers to tamp down expectations and go for the ride.
Review : Kneebody Brings Fresh Sound to SF JAZZ
Kneebody Brings Fresh Sound to SF JAZZ
December 18th, 2007
By Aaron Nicholas Arabian
Kneebody
25th Anniversary San Francisco Jazz Festival
Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, California
November 7, 2007
While yesterday’s jazz greats had swing, bebop, and hard bop forming the core of their influences, the young improvisers of today have been brought up with a whole spectrum of musical influences, traditions and styles. From electronic music to hip hop to hard rock, the new generation of musicians soaks up everything around it and comes up with many nice surprises. Kneebody, a band of LA-based musicians, is a perfect example of a genre-defying fresh new sound. Performing recently as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the group was featured on a concert program subtitled “New Discoveries.” Although many fans of more straight-ahead, mainstream jazz might have been put off by the aggressive, abrasive, even “noisy” approach of Kneebody, no one could deny that the group has carved out a sound completely its own, taking the improvisational spirit that jazz fans love and mixing it with an arresting, multi-faceted aesthetic at once refreshing and challenging.
After a brief intro, the band went into a pulsing, rhythmic piece focusing more on composition than improvisation. At times the five members seemed to have their own individual rhythmic agendas, with melodies and chords dancing around each other in a manner echoing Steve Reich’s minimalist compositions.
Most of the set was aimed in a similar direction, each tune an unpredictable series of grooves some of which resonated with the dark soundscapes of Radiohead—gloomy and textured but with Kneebody’s signature harmonic and rhythmic complexity. The penultimate tune (for this listener the most exciting number on the program) started with trumpeter Shane Endsley playing a lyrical, fanfare-like passage with Arabic flavors. Picking up a cue in the melody, percussionist Nate Wood began with some cymbal-concentrated drumming, laying down the first in a long series of morphing grooves while the horns followed closely, playing rhythmically tight melodies and creating oxymoronically sweet-sounding dissonances.
“Although many fans of more straight-ahead jazz might have been put off by the abrasive approach of Kneebody, no one could deny that the group has carved out a sound completely its own.”
At times the rhythm section sounded like Metallica trying to play funk, or perhaps The Family Stone attempting metal. Saxophonist Ben Wendel’s solo was frantic yet calculated, incantatory yet interesting, as he stamped out unique phrases that seemed almost intentionally unsatisfying.
It can be extremely difficult to tell how much of a Kneebody performance is improvised and how much is composed. The group is known for using a series of pre-planned musical cues to get from one groove to the next, or to change tempos, to modulate to a different key, or to signal certain members to drop out as well as come in. Such “planned spontaneity” lends itself to a fascinating, albeit sometimes enigmatic, sort of group improvisation that in turn creates the impression of the song practically playing itself. The tune “Coat Rack,” for example, though well-known to listeners of the band’s first album, had an extended solo section after the head, unlike the sequence of solos and soloists on the recorded track. Keyboardist Adam Benjamin growled frantically on his distorted Rhodes over a bed of distorted bass and back-beat (occasionally break-beat) drums. When they went back into the head, the tempo was twice as fast and the rhythm a galloping, ping- pongy groove that the whole band contributed to with seemingly nonchalant precision.
At the same time, the Kneebody that so many followers of the LA music scene has grown to love—the group that used to play a weekly gig at a small Santa Monica club called The Vic, employing more of their signature cues more frequently while taking the songs to looser, more stretched-out, free-form realms with exhilarating solos and heady compositions—was less in evidence on this occasion. Perhaps it was the crowd and the nature of the event— a sit-down concert rather than an informal gig at a small local venue—that made the musicians tailor their music to a more general audience, providing easy-to-digest songs exhibiting their sound at the expense of some of the unpredictable energy.
Kneebody was, as always, engaging if not captivating, especially for anyone new to their music. A fan accustomed to their “older” sound may have wanted to catch some riskier, extemporaneous playing from the group and the soloists alike but, as always, the band displayed its distinctive approach to instrumental, improvised music. They captured the spirit of Bird, Monk, Coltrane and Sun Ra but reflected the cutting- edge sounds and styles of a new millennium.