Category Archives: Reviews

Nice Italian Review In “Musica Jazz”

December 14, 2010 Reviews.

http://www.musicajazz.it/columns/13

Partiamo dal nome, curioso e d’un certo appeal, quanto meno sonoro: Kneebody. La traduzione italiana equivale all’improbabile termine: ginocchio-corpo. «Mia moglie l’urlò quasi per gioco. Cercavamo un titolo per un brano e alla fine è diventato il nome del gruppo». Ce lo racconta Ben Wendel, che assieme a Shane Endsley, Kaveh Rastegar, Nate Wood e Adam Benjamin compone i Kneebody.
Questo quintetto all’americana, formatosi tra i banchi dell’Eastman School of Music e il CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), è tra le band più suggestive e futuristiche in circolazione. La critica di mezzo mondo ne riconosce l’originalità.
Ben suona ogni sassofono, Shane la tromba, Adam, Kaveh e Nate (rispettivamente a pianoforte, basso e batteria) costituiscono la ritmica. L’assetto (Kaveh lo definisce: «traditional jazz quintet orchestration») allinea i Kneebody su un asse immaginario che comprende il quintetto del «Jazz At Massey Hall» (Parker-Gillespie-Powell-Mingus-Roach, 1953) e i gruppi di Joe Henderson e Woody Shaw.
Fin qui nulla di nuovo. Senonché il basso è elettrico, e assieme al pianoforte convivono clavinet, Fender Rhodes e sintetizzatore. C’è pure la melodica. Effetti di ogni sorta, soprattutto a pedale, contribuiscono a creare un insieme sonoro articolato e molto ben definito. Per i Kneebody l’effettistica non è un colorante. La poetica del gruppo dipende molto da quei suoni continuamente elaborati e combinati. Il quintetto è un’autentica unit of sound, che scivola da una sezione all’altra dei brani gestendo volumi e dinamiche di ogni tipo.
Miles Davis Quintet, Elliot Smith, D’Angelo, Queens of the Stone Age, Led Zeppelin, Xtc, Claudia Quintet, Jim Black’s Alas No Axis, Ron Miles, Bill Frisell, Radiohead, Brad Mehldau, Deerhoof, Weather Report, Wayne Shorter, Nels Cline, i Beatles, Caetano Veloso sono le principali influenze. Senza la compresenza delle tre dimensioni (acustica, elettrica ed elettronica) risulterebbe difficile rendere in maniera completa quest’universo di ascolti. Inevitabile che una tale varietà comporti un alto tasso di indefinibilità.
«La nostra musica è talmente cambiata ed evoluta negli anni», ci racconta Kaveh, «che è davvero difficile definirla. Lascio l’incarico a qualcun altro». Per Ben il nome Kneebody funziona come una maschera: «Volevamo qualcosa che fosse corto, facilmente memorizzabile e che non rivelasse che genere di musica suonassimo». Eppure di fronte alla domanda diretta: «Siete propensi a considerare la vostra musica come jazz?», nessun tentennamento, «Yes!».
Esordio ufficiale con «Kneebody», secondo titolo della Greenleaf di Dave Douglas, seguito dal bellissimo «Low Electrical Worker» e da «You Can Have Your Moment».
Un complesso sistema d’entrate (system of musical cueing) guida la musica del gruppo. Tocca a Shane illustrarcelo: «Abbiamo progressivamente sviluppato una serie di frasi [Nate ne conta tra quaranta e cinquanta] che segnalano i cambiamenti che vogliamo fare nel corso di un brano. Lo abbiamo importato da gente come Steve Coleman, James Brown, Wayne Krantz. Ognuno di noi può suonare una di queste frasi per cambiare chiave, volume, tempo, direzione, metro, eccetera. È un aspetto assolutamente unico del gruppo». E nei Kneebody si è leader a turno.
Assieme a Theo Bleckmann registrano «Twelve Songs By Charles Ives», in finale ai Grammy 2010 (categoria Best Classical Crossover Album): «Fu Kent Nagano [ricordate il direttore di Zappa con la Lso?] a proporci l’idea. Eravamo l’elemento new music del Munich Opera Festival 2007». Si tratta di una delle rarissime incursioni in jazz nel repertorio di Ives: dodici canzoni trattate come standard.
Ma è in «A Jazz Life» (Kind of Blue), che trovi i Kneebody che non ti aspetti. La band accompagna in incognito il clarinetto di Tony Scott in quella che sarà la sua ultima registrazione: «Lavorare con Tony è stata un’esperienza intensa e ricompensante. I ricordi sono incredibili. Siamo molto orgogliosi di aver potuto suonare con questa leggenda del jazz».

Luca Civelli

Review: A Crossover Crosses Back

November 10, 2010 Reviews. Tags , , , , , .

NY Times
Nate Chinen
August 13th, 2010

Cohesion is the truest constant in the music of Kneebody, a band that inhabits the borderland abutted by post-bop, indie-rock and hip-hop, without seeming to give much thought to the borders. The group released an ethereal album of Charles Ives songs last year, earning an unlikely Grammy nomination in the classical crossover field. “You Can Have Your Moment” (Winter & Winter), the follow- up, takes a screeching turn in the direction of groove. At the album’s core is a lean but darkly woozy rhythm section composed of Adam Benjamin on Fender Rhodes piano, Kaveh Rastegar on electric bass and Nate Wood on drums. The trumpeter Shane Endsley and the saxophonist Ben Wendel make up the front line, though not always with respect to melody. Everyone proves himself a resourceful improviser, but over the course of a dozen thoughtful originals — ranging from the sober hum of “The Entrepreneur” to the stuttering lunge of “No Thank You Mr. West” — their clout registers as a cogent whole.

Review: Tinges of Electro-Pop and Some Ives, Too

November 9, 2010 Reviews. Tags , , , , , .

NY Times
Nate Chinen
February 18th, 2010

Among the ways to pin down Kneebody, a resolutely unpin-downable band, a few come rooted in plain fact. The group uses a common jazz instrumentation — trumpet, saxophone, rhythm section — to make a somewhat less common amalgam of urban-signifying genres, from electro-pop to punk-rock to hip-hop. Four of its five members met in the late 1990s at the Eastman School of Music. Its most recent album, “Twelve Songs by Charles Ives” (Winter & Winter), featuring the vocalist Theo Bleckmann, was nominated for a Grammy this year, in the category of best classical crossover album.

The applicable word there is crossover, which Kneebody has claimed as a directive, more for aesthetic than commercial reasons. This week, during a four-night run in a black box at the Theaters at 45 Bleecker, the band is playing two shows nightly, with featured guests including Mr. Bleckmann and the indie-rapper Busdriver. (Only one of them will be singing Ives.) The run began on Wednesday with the trombonist Josh Roseman and the guitarist Ben Monder: jazz musicians both, though that was only a common dialect.

Mr. Monder fashioned a prelude to the first set: a slow cycle of arpeggios, each note rippling soft and reflective. The bassist Kaveh Rastegar, composer of the piece, eventually joined him, creating a faint pulse with the drummer Nate Wood. Then came a calmly drifting melody, played by the trumpeter Shane Endsley, and the rounded chime of Adam Benjamin’s Fender Rhodes piano. It was all dreamlike and vague, emotionally muted even during a solo by Mr. Endsley, who played in a pacifying murmur.

The set proceeded from this baseline, with an enveloping atmosphere and an arid, soft-hued tonal spectrum, like a sonic equivalent to the painterly abstractions of Georgia O’Keeffe. There was one song by Mr. Roseman, a warmly poplike ballad called “Fortunato,” and two by Mr. Endsley, including one that resembled a warm-up exercise, with his long tones soberly set against a kind of Morse-code syncopation.

A lot was happening on the level of texture, but the music felt pregnant with stasis. An exception came in the other of Mr. Endsley’s tunes, courtesy of the tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel, spewing ribbons of notes, and Mr. Monder, who coarsened his output with distortion. Their heat drew out the band’s wilder side. Or maybe they had warmed up to meet some unspoken need in the music. Typically for Kneebody, it was hard to tell.

Review : Kneebody Brings Fresh Sound to SF JAZZ

December 18, 2007 Reviews. Tags , , .

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.

Review : Jazz Convention Italy

December 12, 2007 Reviews. Tags .

Jazz Convention [Italy]
December 12th, 2007
Jazz Convention
by Diego D’Angelo, December 2007

(The following are excerpts from the original Italian)

“Jazz elettrico? No, oseremmo dire jazz futurista.”

“Il suono della band è un mix di influenze radicalmente opposte, da Bjork a Bartok, da Squarepusher a Cannonball Adderley, da Frank Zappa agli Steely Dan, fondando qualcosa di decisamente nuovo. Tra tutti gli strumenti, quello usato in modo particolarmente innovativo – almeno in un disco jazz – è la batteria di Nate Wood, che abbandona lo swing e si produce in un suono secco, con pelli tiratissime un uso di piatti piuttosto parco, e sempre con un suono molto corto.

“D’altra parte, l’insistente uso di Fender Rhodes non può far saltare alla mente i Return To Forever di Chick Corea, e in modo particolare in Mr. Darcy, anche se in brani come Of course è praticamente impossibile non sentire l’influenza del Keith Jarrett dei tempi di Expectations. Assolutamente da segnalare Mahalia, un brano stupendamente rilassato per quanto sempre immerso in sonorità caustiche, che fanno inevitabilmente tornare alla mente certe atmosfere simili del Dave Douglas di dischi come The infinite. Il tutto però naturalmente, più elettrico, più elettronico, più funky, oseremmo dire “più metropolitano”: più futurista, appunto.”

Review : Jazz Magazine (France)

December 12, 2007 Reviews. Tags , .

Jazz Magazine [France]
December 12th, 2007
by Nicolas Bremaud
2007

(this review translated from the French by Kneebody superfans Steven Muller and Gabriel Kyne)

This album gives you seperate samples and tracks by Dr. Beauchef Penguin Dentist. You can remix them as you wish (as long as you don’t make money off of them) but I wouldn’t recommend it, not only because its not of great interest, but also because the original mix by the drummer Nate Wood, also responsible for recording the songs, is simply perfect and you couldn’t do better.

Maybe it’s this mix of haughty lyricism and an almost mathematical approach to the songs that make the sound of Kneebody like “West Coast” music. It reminds us of, particularly in Roll, David Binney’s compositions, who lived in NY, but grew up on the Pacific coast.

The improvisations are parsimonious, very skilled, but always controlled by tight structures; the rhythms are rather heavy and binary. The extreme saturation of the Fender and the hammering of the drums (Poton, Notwithstanding) veer towards more a disheveled sound, in the likes of Gutbucket (New York) or accoustic Ladyland (London).

Kneebody is grand, yet showing it subtly and elegantly. All these groups are in the middle of meticulously erasing the line between jazz and rock (if not drawing new ones) much more efficiently than the jazz-rock bands of the 70s. Among them, Kneebody holds a strong place.

Review : Kneebody

November 25, 2007 Reviews. Tags .

Kneebody
November 25th, 2007
Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

A hip friend and music critic recently advised (or demanded) that I check out this very hip and young quintet. Long story short, the band’s latest album will sure be counted among my 2007 top-10 list. Powerful, articulate and teeming with youthful enthusiasm, this album is asymmetrical parts jazz, grunge, jazz-rock and punk. But the predominant component would be progressive-jazz as they stylishly rip through several genres while engineering an inimitable group-focused sound. According to the group’s website, the respective musicians have performed with well-known figures in the jazz, hip-hop and rock spectrum. But like-minded individuals usually generate some magic when aligned.

With a makeup consisting of horns, keys, and the bass-drums element, the band uncannily morphs punchy backbeats with colorific overtones and pesky, soloing spots. They’re a multidimensional unit for sure. And they navigate thru sinuous time signatures with the exactitude of a complex mathematical formula. It’s all energetically executed, where laid-back funk/blues motifs are seamlessly integrated with darting horns choruses, beefy fuzz-bass lines and memorably melodic riffs. At times, trumpeter Shane Endsley and saxophonist Ben Wendel roll of the rhythm section’s variable metrics with a smoothing edge.

They project a panorama of scenarios here, as the quintet also injects a textural approach to these largely, up-tempo and pleasantly, in-your-face and ears pieces. But they tone matters down some on the genteel work titled “Of Course,” then engage difficult rhythmic metrics via the hornists’ circular passages heard on the following number titled “Finlayson.” In other spots, the musicians fuse EFX into their game-plan. And it’s all meaningful and simply adds to the thrust or tonalities of a particular mood or segment. Don’t miss out, folks. This gem is an antidote for those who periodically experience listening fatigue, thanks to a glut of ho-hum recordings emanating from the affordable aspects brought about by the digital age

Review : Dame Dos

September 13, 2007 Reviews. Tags , .

Dame Dos (Translated From Spanish)
September 13th, 2007
Sergio Piccirilli, El Intruso (link)

9/10 Rating

The imagination is not more than the advantage of which it is had in the memory (Pierre Bonnard)

Not always the things are what they seem. Not always a good synthesis expresses a set of things and, much less, it explains them.
Let us imagine to a girl caressing to a cat. We approached sigilosamente and we asked to him:
- Spider?
- No, cat.
An extreme reduction sometimes leads us to an almost irrational point that returns us to the place in where we were originally.
When I listened to speak for the first time of Kneebody, I interrogated my circumstantial interlocutor of the following way:
- What music does?
- Fusion, responded to me.
At that time the Thousand Davises in Bitches Brew, Chick Korea with Return came to my mind to Forever, John McLaughlin with Mahavishnu Orchestra, Joe Zawinul with Weather Report, Larry Coryell with Eleventh House, Tony Williams with Lifetime and, from that, the rest. Surely about that moment I thought “either all I listened to it, or all I know it”; and I followed my way.
Error.
In the case of Kneebody, the answer (although correct) was not the sufficiently abarcativa thing in description terms.
Although also it is certain that the precariedad of my question, of some form, induced to that. Let us continue giving loose rein to the imagination…
In a train the guard is requesting passages. A passenger begins to look for his ticket frenetically. In his desperation he reviews his pockets, the trunks, portafolio, but he does not find it. The guard smiles, observes moments, until she decides to take pity itself of the passenger. He removes the passage to him from the mouth (in where there was been all along) and follows its way. If we had been witnesses of the happened thing, we could conclude in which the fleeting one was an idiot.
How many times has been called on to us to live a similar or at least comparable situation? How many times in the life we acted as the guard and we followed our way?
Perhaps if we returned and we reviewed the situation with thoroughness, we would find a version different from the facts. It is enough like example to indicate that the young person of the story only had a used passage and she was chewing it so that the guard did not realize. Who was the idiot?
Return to the starting point. Kneebody is a fusion band.
Seguimos our way or we deepened?

Excuse all this perorata but, lately, I have developed to an irreducible analytical voracity and a irrefrenable will to know the principles original the things and to establish analogies of compulsive way. And this began when I changed the traditional breakfast of white coffee and toasted with jam by another one with vodka, gin and brandy. The concrete thing is that now always I see the things of two ways or, to be more precise, I see all double.
Kneebody represents a state posmoderno of the fusion music. It combines instrumental sophistication with virtuous improvisations.
In his conceptual nucleus it does not have you limit after the influences. Of Duke Ellington to Jimi Hendrix. Of Steve Reich to Aphex Twin.
Elements that are familiar but that they do not form an impediment to construct a cohesivo and original speech.
Kneebody is a dense amalgam of sorts and styles with a unified and singular voice. An implicit deal with M-Base funk, post futurist rock, the pop camarística introspection and a bittersweet one.
To find a new band integrated by young composers and eximios executants, always is inspirador.
Without going more far, to me it encourages to me and it impels to learn, to improve, to increase the knowledge…
Definitive: the day that finds in where it studies to be young, I register.

The tecladista Adam Benjamim is a respected composer, educator and improvisador that an ample recognition when integrating itself to the Dave Douglas Keystone Band obtained. The trompetista Shane Endsley is graduated as the Eastman School. In his short but prolífica trajectory, it has touched with John Hollenbeck, Ani Di Franco, Slavic Soul Party, David Binney, Steve Coleman, Tim Berne and Ralph Alessi. The drummer Nate Wood is member of the group of pop rock The Calling. The bear Kaveh Rastegar also is withdrawn of the Eastman School and comprises of the Thruster trio next to Timothy Young and Matt Chamberlain, besides to collaborate with musicians of the stature of Nels Cline, Car it Bozulich and Wayne Horvitz. The saxofonista Ben Wendel has touched with Dave Holland, the Todd Sickafoose’ s Blood Orange, Nels Cline and Myra Melford, among others. Hace lacks more?

Low Electrical Worker opens with Poton. There the piano, low and the battery offer a powerful rythmical support so that saxo and the trompeta constructs to delicate textures of resistance, unfolding a speech of strange metric ruthless precision and that establishes a perverse game of seduction with laberínticas and controlled dissonances.
The adjustments in Blue Yellow White construct to polifónicas harmonies and rates in counterpoint, fixing, which seems to be the spine of the aesthetic one of Kneebody.
In the addictive Dr Beauchef Penguin Dentist, delicious groove dresses the harmonic skeleton in clothes hit single.
Flood on 12th Street is an exploratory sonorous block of brief, distant and surrounding outlines. An atmosphere retro characterized by the sound of the Fendher piano distorted Rhodes, in that the single ones neutralize the tendency, so common in the fusion music, to emphasize the technical virtuosity and the note vortex by on the compositivo factor.
Roll allows us to distinguish clear references to the minimalismo. In Notwithstanding they come near with authority to the rock and Of Course is closest to the pop one than we will find in Low Electrical Worker.

In the extensive Finlayson, the base is a generating usina of polirrítmica interaction, while the piano, the trompeta and saxo accentuate and condimentan the structural nucleus. The brief passage of Cupcake Baby goes of the jazz to electronic music. However, the intense misfortune of Looking Back is a combat until death with metrónomo (giggle in the end including). In the melódico drawing of Mahalia, the trompeta and saxo dispute the brush. Finally each one takes hold the own one and that gains the best one. A climatic vals-fusion, deliberately unfinished.
Mr. Darcy is an angular piece, cants and of economic vocabulary.
And the closing, with The Politician, offers a lacking frame of ornamentación, simple and empty (like most of the politicians).
Kneebody incorporates and assimilates, with a manifest balance, the aggressiveness of the rock, melodías of pop a baroque one, the virtuous improvisations that characterize to the jazz and intelligent compositivas structures.
In synthesis: they make fusion but with an explicit innovating vocation, more interested in formulating questions that in obtaining answers.

From time to time he is healthful to put a question mark in those things that for a long time have occurred like safe (Bertrand Russell)

Review : For jazz, next wave could be Kneebody

August 8, 2007 Reviews. Tags , .

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 : Low Electrical Worker

May 27, 2007 Reviews. Tags , .

Low Electrical Worker
May 27th, 2007
Troy Collins, All About Jazz (link)

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.