One of the coolest thing about listening to music for me is discovering bands and learning about where they are from. Looking at it all in context with everything else that was going on at the time adds more depth to the albums for me. What do Santana, The Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone, Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, Dead Kennedys, D.R.I., Psychic TV, Chrome, Flipper, Geza X, The Disposible Heros of Hiphoprisy, Peter Apfelbaum, Charlie Hunter, The Beat Nigs, Metallica, Journey, Del and Hieroglyphics have in common? The bay area, sillyface.

Larry Graham is one of my favorites. I remember discovering Larry in high school from other musician friends. We would trade tapes of his band Graham Central Station and we would all learn basslines like the one he plays on the song “Hair”. There’s tons of footage of him on youtube; especially stuff with Sly and Family Stone. I remember hearing them for the first time with Scott Seiver at a Psychodelic Zombiez show in Denver. We discovered a lot of stuff then.

Tower of Power was another band. Those songs were so cool. I remember when we would learn those songs and as we were listening to them, we would conduct all of the intricate parts as they were happening. I always loved the extended instrumentals like “Waking Down Hip Street” and “Squib Cakes” where everyone would solo. The climax would usually be a Chester Thompson organ solo where he would sustain a note while comping and the band grooving along! They are still playing with the rhythm section of David Garibaldi and Rocco Prestia. They’ll be in LA in September. I hope I get a chance to see them.

I’ve been having so much fun lately looking for cool music stuff on you tube. Over the past year I’ve taken for granted the fact that you can look up any amazing performance and likely be able to see it on the computer. This used to not be possible! The other night, I was searching for some Meshell footage and found these below. I played with some firends last week and couldn’t believe how much I was thinking about Meshell’s playing while I played. So inspiring. Also here’s some amazing footage of the Wynton Kelly trio with Trane.

This is a test of the forthcoming Kneebody Podcast.

 

 Low Electrical Worker Highlights: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We just played at Stanford for the Stanford Jazz Workshop. It was so much fun. Thanks so much to Jim Sidell, Taylor Eigsti, Harish Raghavan and everyone at Stanford while we were there. We had a blast!
Quick note: One of the people we met at Stanford was trombonist Jeff Cressman. He was in Peter Apfelbaum’s Hieroglyphics Ensemble and played on the albums “Sign’s Of Life” and “Jodoji Brightness” as well as Don Cherry’s album “Multi Kulti”. Shane and I used to listen to those albums back in Denver a lot. He told me that apparently when A and M jazz dissolved around ten years ago, they ended up throwing a lot of those jazz albums away. Multi Kulti ended up in a trash compactor because apparently it was cheaper to destroy the music than to sell it. I need to find those albums again. I’m so glad that they were recorded in the first place.

Kaveh

Speaking if Don Cherry, here is an awesome clip of him playing with Sonny Rollins, Bily higgins and Paul Chambers…..

For jazz, next wave could be Kneebody
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
Article Launched: 07/27/2007 01:31:36 AM PDT

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.
There is 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.

LOW ELECTRICAL WORKER
By Troy Collins
All About Jazz
May 24th, 2007

A young quintet on the rise, Kneebody’s self-titled 2005 debut on Dave Douglas’ then newly formed Greenleaf records was an obvious indicator of its potential. The group’s sophomore follow-up, Low Electrical Worker (released on Colortone Media), is a dense amalgam of genres and styles delivered with a unified voice.
Filled with youthful vigor, Kneebody delivers a sense of palpable enthusiasm throughout these varied tunes. Weaving together an impressive collection of stylistic influences, the quintet knits threads of M-Base funk, post rock futurism, Sabbath-inspired thrash, bittersweet pop and chamber-esque introspection into a singular sonic tapestry.

Each piece runs through an array of perambulations inside modular structures; contrapuntal rhythms, polyphonic harmonies and metric tempo shifts are all part of the Kneebody aesthetic. Never just a means to an end, all these virtuosic trappings are at the service of tuneful, sing-song melodies bolstered by infectious rhythms. Accessibility is Kneebody’s secret weapon.

With a distorted Fender Rhodes and fuzz-toned electric bass at its disposal, Kneebody occasionally rocks, hard. While the retro ambience of the Fender Rhodes is currently in vogue, it’s nice to hear someone who really understands the intricacies and history of the instrument. Adam Benjamin is such a player. From waves of ring modulated distortion to ethereal vibe-like tonalities, he coaxes an array of otherworldly sounds from the instrument.

Bassist Kaveh Rastegar and drummer Nate Wood are an outstanding rhythm duo, interlocking in polyrhythms with an ease that belies their complexity. Saxophonist Ben Wendell and trumpeter Shane Endsley create a harmonious blend, weaving intricate dual horn counterpoint with ebullience. Always mindful of the tunes’ structure, solos are thematically driven and designed to accentuate the tune at hand, not the ego of the soloist.

A heady blend of aggressive rock music conventions, gorgeously baroque pop melodies, virtuosic jazz improvisation and intricate compositional smarts, Kneebody forges headlong into the future. Low Electrical Worker is an ideal balance between popular music and jazz improvisation, fusion in the most perfect sense of the term.

In July we were in Munich. This was a trip that was over a year in the making. The trip was organized through Kent Nagano and the Munich Opera as a series of four concerts held at the Pinakotek Der Moderne (modern art museum). A while ago we had started planning two of the concerts, a collaboration with Theo Bleckmann playing the music of Charles Ives as well as a concert with the percussion quartet So Percussion.
The first night in Munich was one of those perfect nights to drop into a city. We walked from our hotel to the opera house and were able to see a bit of a free outdoor concert called “Opera For All” with Placido Domingo singing Wagner. It was actually a simulcast from inside the opera house that was broadcast live in the courtyard of the building on a giant screen. I have some photos of close-ups of the opera singers’ disembodied heads with their serious and sometimes frightening faces looking as if they were about to eat the crowd. It was impressive and calm too because of everyone gathered outside listening.

I was in search of the beer that I had been hearing so much of before I went and eventually I found it. After that night though, everything moved very fast. Almost everyday we were in rehearsal.
The first set of stuff to work on was the Ives music with Theo. Theo is so much fun to be around. This is the first time we’ve been able to work together. He is now definitely a member of the band! We created instant comedy routines and jokes that referenced all of the new experiences that we were having. For the concert each of us picked a few of the Ives pieces to arrange. The result turned out really well I think and will hopefully result in a recording over the next year.
The next concert we prepared for was the collaboration with So Percussion. For that concert, we played a combination of pieces including a piece by Steve Reich, “Worker’s Union” by Louis Andreissen, and a transcription and arrangement I did of a Persian classical piece by Hamid Motebassem. We also played original music by Ben, Adam and Jason from So. It was fun working with this group of guys that work so well together and play often times like one instrument. It was fun orchestrating this out. There are moments in the Workers Union piece as well as Adam’s song where the ensembles trade sections and that single instrument effect is really heard.

After the So concert I was the first to leave the concert hall and load my stuff into the van. I sat outside waiting for the rest of the guys for what seemed like a ridiculously long time. After all, the security guard at the Pinakotek was giving us the nudge out the door. So I went back inside to find out what was taking everyone so long. I found them all (Kneebody, So, security guard) trapped in the glass elevator at the museum. They’re all still in there to this day. I left them stranded in the elevator and just opened a bakery in Munich where I sit writing this blog! Mmm…espresso! No, they were rescued after what seemed like close to an hour of my laughing hysterically as they grumbled and shifted around in the glass chamber.

Here are a couple of photos of the boys trapped in the box together:

We also played an acoustic jazz concert featuring the music of our very own Ben Wendel. Ben just finished recording an album that sounds really good. I can’t wait for everyone to hear it.
Oh and in the middle of that we flew to Rotterdam (city of architecture!) and played a set at the North Sea Jazz Festival. It was a rainy morning when we arrived and we were all very tired. Adam, Adie and I were able to eat some food at a Surinamese deli. Eventually we made it to the festival. Everyone had been telling us different things about what the festival would be like. The first impression is that it really was a jazz mall like someone had explained. A really big place…thousands of people…altered chords and trombones!! Once we got in and started to meet everyone working with the festival we were all really blown away by how organized and helpful everyone was. The stage manager at our venue was especially nice and wonderful to work with. Our concert was held in a Spiegel tent (picture stained glass, wood floors, beer steins and men and women dancing around in a circle with arms interlocked carousel style). Right before we were about to play we all had the realization that despite the busy week we had all been having together, this was actually the first set of Kneebody music that we were playing. Inside the tent with everyone there and the lights (!) it got very hot very quick. Our set was so much fun and it was definitely the sweatiest that we had all been playing our music. My strings went completely dead. There is video of the show where one will notice that Ben’s grey shirt very quickly becomes black with sweat. Black Sweat.
One of the highlights of this short trip was getting to see the other artists playing at North Sea. I think that if you were to ask everyone in the band who their favorite artist they saw was, they would probably all say that it was Joe Lovano with the SF Jazz Collective. From the first note he played you couldn’t wait to hear what would come next.
The next morning we flew back to Munich to play one final show of Kneebody music. The whole experience was great for all of us. Thanks to Maestro Nagano, Frau Dengler, Eleanor(!), The Munich Opera, Theo, So, everyone at North Sea, and everyone who came out to the concerts!