Search & Restore presents 4 nights of Kneebody :
BUY Tickets Now: http://www.littlefieldnyc.com/calendar/

Every night features two sets, one of Kneebody classic and a second set with special guests.
DETAILS:

*Wednesday, 4/11 at 9 PM:
The Music of Tom Ze + Guests: Mark Guiliana, Gretchen Parlato and more TBA

*Thursday, 4/12 at 9 PM:
The Music of Judee Sill
Guest vocalist : A mystery for now until a high profile show for him is passed, but he’s a past collaborator of the band.

*Friday, 4/13 at 7:30 PM: EARLY
The Music of Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi

*Saturday, 4/14 at 7:30 PM: EARLY Supremely Special secret guest

________________________

In April we will be in Europe doing some concerts. Check our shows page for info…..

Kneebody had a great week last week. We set some time aside to record a couple of albums. One was a project with Daedelus. The other was our new album. We did them back to back over four days at Sunset Sound in LA. Then we had a three night run of shows at the Blue Whale. So much fun playing together. There is a Europe run coming up as well as another residency in April in New York. Lot’s of new music!!!

Hey Everybody,

Kneebody will be in LA again for THREE NIGHTS at the Blue Whale in downtown Los Angeles. The last run there was fantastic. We also had a full house all three nights so we highly recommend pre-ordering tickets here!!! See you there.

We will also be previewing music from our 4th studio album, which will be recorded that same week!

123 astronaut E S Onizuka St. Suite 301
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Tel: 213-620-0908

dates: march 15th, 16th, 17th

time: 9pm to 12pm (two sets)

details: MINORS ALLOWED WITH GUARDIAN

cover: $15 — $25 for 2 nights — $35 for 3 nights

KNEEBODY BIO:

“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” NY Times, 2010

By combining sophisticated compositions and virtuosic improvising, the Grammy nominated group Kneebody has created a diverse, loyal fan base in the United States and Europe. Founded in 2001, Kneebody has built upon an impressive array of individual resumes and conservatory training to create a truly singular voice within the instrumental world.

In 2005 Kneebody released their debut album “Kneebody” on Dave Douglas’ Greenleaf Music Label. In 2007 they followed up with “Low Electrical Worker” on the Colortone Label. A collection of 13 original songs, “Low Electrical Worker” was hailed by saxophonist Joshua Redman as one of his “favorite albums of 2007″. In the spring of 2009, Kneebody and vocalist Theo Bleckmann released “12 Songs of Charles Ives” on the Winter & Winter label and received a Grammy nomination in the “classical crossover” category. Kneebody is presently touring in support of their third studio album, “You Can Have Your Moment,” also on the Winter & Winter label.

www.kneebody.com
www.facebook.com/kneebody
www.youtube.com/fiveropes

Click this link and see that Shane Endsley’s fantastic album “Then the Other” was mentioned in the LA TIMES as one of the best Jazz albums of 2011. Congrats Shane! Here’s a link where you can listen to it and buy it!

Working with these two artists is always a thrill and it’s always easy to get to music quickly. That’s what we needed to do when we played with Busdriver and Daedelus at the Little Temple in Silverlake earlier this month. We had the day to get the music together. So we set a time and met at the club and rehearsed the music for the night. The set with Daedelus was really fun to put together. He had a bunch of pre written songs that he played us. These are songs that he can deconstruct in the moment – loop bits – and isolate sounds making them easy to play over. We picked about 6 or 7 and then we worked out general shapes and then had a good idea of what to play. This Spring we’re going to record an album with Daedelus, so this was a good night to start to get ready for that. With Busidriver, there are around ten or eleven songs that we have arranged with him over the years. He posted on his facebook something to the effect of ” come hear me perform some of these classics for the last time…”. Anyhow, he’s really fun to play with and super easy and reactive. I really hope that someday we get a chance to work together in the studio. Here’s a clip of the last song we played that night called “Imaginary Places” (the clip was masterfully shot and edited by Alex Chaloff):

Psyched for our show on December 4th in LA with Busdriver and our special guest . Here’s the link for the info. Kneebody with Busdriver sounds like this:

We were honored to have been recognized in the 2011 Downbeat Readers Poll for Jazz Group, Adam Benjamin for Electric Keyboard and Kaveh Rastegar for Electric Bass.

We recently played a sold out 3 night run of shows at the Blue Whale in LA. These shows were so much fun. Night 3 of the residency was documented by Alex Chaloff. We sifted through the amazing footage that he shot that night and all of the clips are now viewable on youtube. Here’s a link to all of them. Also here’s a clip of us playing Shane’s tune Teddy Ruxpin:

We recently had a quick whirlwind trip in Europe. We got to places we’ve never been. The tour started in Prague. We played at a place called The Jazz Dock. We heard a great group there called DoMa Ensemble. They were a duo of a couple named Dorota and Marcel. Thanks Dorota for lending me your power adaptor for the show. Anyhow, the show was full. Awesome thing. I went for a jog the next morning. Didn’t see much except for a taste of what seemed like an amazing city. The Charles Bridge, Kafka museum (statue of two guys pissing…). Saw a lot actually. Then we drove through the Czech Republic through the country to Dresden! We played that night downstairs at a great venue called Jazz Tonne. It was a really fun show. Thanks so much to Stefan for having us there. I didn’t get to speak with him much but he seemed like a really great guy. Adam wasn’t feeling his best so we soundchecked without him. He ended up making it and we played a great show. I talked with a young couple afterward. They were inspired by the Occupy protests happening in the States. The next morning,we woke up, bought some fruit… (shane bought a lot) and we drove through the country, south to Munich. It was a beautiful drive. The sun was out. We got to Munich. It’s the first time we’ve been there since we were there with Theo Bleckmann and So Percussion for our concerts there. We made it to the hotel. I parked the car. We had a sweet Fiat BTW. We had a couple hours before going to the venue which was The Unterfahrt. We soundchecked there. I had a coffee. We ordered the same food. Pumpkin soup… something else that was good! We got to see our friends Stefan Winter, Mariko and Regine from Winter and Winter. Our show was a lot of fun. Shane played a great solo during the encore of Nerd Mountain where he quoted “Ill Remember April” and “Well You Needn’t”. What more can you ask for. I was dead tired. All of these shows were day after day. The next morning, we woke up in Munich. I had only slept a few hours and we drove to Geneva. The drive was another long one. At one point, I think in Austria, we stopped at a supermarket. We all bought sandwiches. I also bought a Mars Bar. I never buy them in the states but I know that in Italy… probably Europe in general the Mars Bars pack a punch. I also bought some deoderant and a coffee for 20 cents at the doorway of the supermarket. It was horrible. But the sandwich was great! Anyhow, we drove to Geneva. We stayed in hotel that has the claim to fame of having the world’s largest pendulum. We played that night at an amazing place called AMR. It’s a community music school in Geneva. We met Brooks and Stefan who helped us get set up. Amazing gear they have there. I played through an AMPEG B 18 which I didn’t even know existed. Very awesome show. Had a great time meeting evey body there. The next morning woke up and drove through the country two hours to MURI. On the way we stopped at an autogrille for some food. WE were destroyed by the exchange rate and payed around $150 for 2 sandwiches, 3 slices of pizza 3 drinks and 2 coffees… Muri was a beautiful little town. Stephen Diethelm had us out there. He’s a great guy who puts on a great concert series. We had a great night. I took a nap before the show. Stephen brought my some pasta from his house to fuel up on. We had an amazing show. Really intimate. Great crowd. It was all recorded and clips are now floating around on the web… And that was it!!! Whirlwind. I slept a few hours and then at 4am Shane and I drove through the fog to Zurich where I flew to Amsterdam and then back to LA on Halloween!!! Happy Belated Halloween. Thanks to everyone who had us out there and we hope to come back soon!!!!

AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

TO GET ON OUR MAILING LIST, SEND YOUR EMAIL TO:  KNEEBODY@KNEEBODY.COM

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

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.

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.

11.18.10
8:00PM
Duc Des Lombards » Paris, France
42 Rue Lombards
75001 Paris, France
01 42 33 22 88

11.19.10
8:00PM
Duc Des Lombards » Paris, France
42 Rue Lombards
75001 Paris, France
01 42 33 22 88

11.20.10
8:00PM
Rotterdam International Jazz Festival » Rotterdam

New Album YOU CAN HAVE YOUR MOMENT is out now!!!

BUY OUR ALBUM HERE!!!
DOWNLOAD ALBUM HERE!!!!

Interview with Shane on The Jazz Set. Check News for the link!!!

Kneebody has been nominated for BEST JAZZ GROUP in the 2010 DOWNBEAT READERS POLL. Also Adam Benjamin has been nominated for ELECTRIC KEYBOARD and Kaveh Rastegar for ELECTRIC BASS. Check out the poll online: www.downbeat.com

Kneebody has been nominated for BEST JAZZ GROUP in the 2010 DOWNBEAT READERS POLL. Also Adam Benjamin has been nominated for ELECTRIC KEYBOARD and Kaveh Rastegar for ELECTRIC BASS. Check out the poll online: downbeat.com

Hi Everyone – friendly reminder…

We have a special all ages show coming up on June 17th. It may be one of the only gigs we do this year in LA – there will be special pre-release copies of our new studio album available at the performance.

SPECIAL NOTE: The venue is not very big and tickets are starting to go – we recommend reserving in advance! Here’s the info:

Kneebody @ Angel’s in Santa Monica

Thursday, June 17th
2460 W. Wilshire Blvd
Santa Monica, CA
We will be playing two sets: 8pm and 10pm. $15 for one set and $20 for both.

LIMITED SEATING – ADVANCE TICKETS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
brownpapertickets.com

FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE:
Facebook Events Page

Kneebody Residency in NYC!

“In the spirit of the old country, Search And Restore is presenting Kneebody for your face-melting pleasure FOUR nights in a row, TWO Sets every night, giving you, the jazz loving consumer, so many chances to see this amazing band perform, improvise and develop. Plus, each night features one set from Kneebody being Kneebody, and one set with special guests. Here’s the rundown:

Wed, Feb 17th- Kneedbody + Josh Roseman & Ben Monder ~
Thurs, Feb 18th- Kneebody + Busdriver *
Fri, Feb 19th- Kneebody + Busdriver & Dan Weiss *
Sat, Feb 20th- Kneebody + Theo Bleckmann (Charles Ives Project) ~

* = 1st set is solo Kneebody
~ = 2nd set is solo Kneebody

It starts at 10:30 PM, a ticket for one night is $15, $12 with student ID. A two night pass: $25 / three nights: $35 / four nights: $40

You can buy tickets online here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/96128

These guys do not play New York City often, and this is going to be a one of a kind experience. If you’re not familiar with Busdriver, he’s a really amazing west coast rapper, weird and wonderful, he and Kneebody have worked together before on some incredible collaborations, and this will be an insane chance to see them live together, especially with Dan Weiss on a second drum set!!

All of this is happening at our new space, 45 Bleecker, in the Bleecker St. Theater. It will be fantastic. Mark your calendars, buy the tickets, and we’ll see you there.”

Yesterday was Grammy day, and after much bureaucratic shuffling, the attendees were Adam, Kaveh, Angela, and Shane. It was a full day commitment involving suits and parking passes and stashed-away granola bars. The event bore some resemblance to other large conventions (although it is decidedly better-dressed than the National Baseball Card Convention). One thing going for me is that I love convention centers. I found one large area that was totally empty and had weird 80’s graphics on the carpeting and that made me very happy.

But more along the lines of things that other human beings would find interesting, there were definitely lots of celebrities there, both in the Uninteresting Super Famous Person category as well as the Interesting Moderately Famous Person category. Highlights for me celebrity-wise were brief moments I shared with Queen Latifah (waiting in line eating pretzels together), George Clinton (I helped him deflect an overzealous fan), and sitting behind Neil Young.

The telecast itself was, as you know if you saw even a brief moment, a spectacle on a grand scale. The general storyline seemed to be Sexy Chick Battle in which Lady Gaga played the annoying artsy girl that one roots against, Taylor Swift played the sweet naive country girl that one roots for, and Beyonce keeps it from seeming too white. My favorite thing was seeing Stephen Colbert in person, and P!nk becoming a human Spr!nkler was pretty cool.

More interesting was the pre-telecast in which more, uh, well-rounded music people were featured. There’s a whole range of hard-working musicians who are working in fields visible or obscure that are there to receive accolades from their colleagues and that is nice to see. Chick Corea wore a really weird shirt.

In total, although from my personal perspective the usual caveats apply about awards shows and other overly tangible signs of success in the arts, it was a real honor to be included in such a thing, and really nice to get an approving nod from the nominating and voting committees. The band works very hard and I am really happy to see the other guys have a reason to celebrate. It’s also been nice to hear that fans and friends have felt inspired that our quite personal and entirely uncompromising music would be honored by such a mainstream organization. It reinforces my long-held belief that the strongest statement is the most strongly believed statement, and that little good is done in the arts by trying to appeal to others, even toward that very goal.

Yoshi’s San Francisco
1330 Fillmore Street
San Francisco, CA 94115
Contact: 415.655.5600
Doors at 7:30PM
Show at 8:00PM
Cover: $12
All ages

First off, I am having trouble figuring out how to make paragraphs in this blog editor. So, this post will be a list of BULLET POINTS, but is intended to be paragraphs and should be read as such. Sorry for this. OK Here we Go!
Thanks to everyone who made this a great trip for us: Ralph, Jake, Clark, Tiffany and all the SIM students, James and Adam at Search and Restore, Tony Falco at the Falcon Arts Center, Jon, Jeff and Shanta at Joe’s Pub, Jonathan, Harish and Alan for housing.
It was a rewarding trip not least because we were able to see a lot of great music on some nights off and after our gigs. There is so much great stuff happening in New York right now (as always). Ben Monder is sounding better than ever with his new trio (Ben Street and Alan Ferber). Jim Black and Alasnoaxis had a fantastic CD release show at the Bowery Poetry Club. Nate sounded great playing with Nir Felder at Fatcat where I played some sweaty ping-pong and chatted with fellow Banff faculty Matt Penman.
There is a lot of talk these days about a downswing in festival sponsorship, some venues closing, transformation of the record industry, etc. etc. Yet I am still convinced that the “jazz scene” (I put it in quotes to convey its very ambiguous bounds) is overflowing with talented musicians making compelling music, and that there are places for this music to be performed and appreciated. Sure, not every city has a perfect venue, and it’s difficult to make a lot of money performing creative instrumental music, but I think that looking back on this period it will be clear that it was a rich and vibrant time for the music despite some of these difficulties.
Playing in New York, still the epicenter of the jazz scene after 70 years, is a special pleasure for us. All of our music is imbued with new layers of meaning when it occurs within a community and an artistic context, and we are honored to participate in the rich and varied world that is the “jazz scene” in New York today. So again, thanks to everyone that helped this week happen, and we’ll see you all again soon.
–adam

Exciting day. Adam and Kaveh arrived in New York late last night. Met Shane at the show today in Williamsburg, waited for Nate and Ben to make it into town from Germany! We had a great show at Public Assembly today… Thanks to James and Adam from Search and Restore for having us there. Also thanks to Steve Coleman and Andrew D’Angelo for playing such great music today. Now: June 21st @ Joe’s Pub!!!!

Hi folks, Adam here. After Kneebody played in Minneapolis on Friday, I stayed a few extra days to check out the town. The following is a short travel essay on my experiences, cross-posted from adambenjamin.net. Thanks for reading!

A peculiar combination of factors led to my spending the last four days in Minneapolis and environs. Said factors included: personal work-scheduling oddities, the opportunity for discount travel, some stubborn sense from my youth that time spent traveling alone is somehow necessary for personal growth (even when I don’t particularly want to be away from my wonderful wife), a fascination with the American Midwest and the baseball-card-collecting subculture thereof, and the touring schedules of Kneebody, Brad Mehldau and the Kansas City Royals. The result was exquisite, a long weekend in Minnesota that was both busy and quiet.

The foundation of the trip was a short trip with Kneebody, including two clinics, a concert at Dazzle and a KUVO radio spot in Denver, followed by a concert at Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis. Playing and teaching in Denver was a treat as always. (Thanks to Tyler, Donald, Gerry, Pam, Karen, Bob.) Playing in Minneapolis for the first time was great, as we have been meaning to infiltrate the Twin Cities for quite some time. (Thanks to Dan, Lowell, Wesley, Carl Pohlad.)

The rest of my long weekend included visits to two iconic sites of the Super Giant Stuff school of American architecture: the Metrodome and the Mall of America. Bloomington’s Mall of America is famously the largest mall in the USA, and boasts that it attracts more visitors than Disney World, Graceland and the Grand Canyon combined, but as the most extreme example of the mall phenomenon it serves well to demonstrate its limits. A combination of all possible franchises is not novel in itself, although it is theoretically convenient. It is still quite a neutral space and the generic nature of the franchises subdues the mall’s more unique elements (water park, aquarium, amusement park). It is segmented into “neighborhoods” that attempt to group stores appropriately and this results in some interesting visual spaces (notably the pink neon and shiny silver plastic “technology neighborhood” on the third floor) and some memorable nomenclature (the Macy’s end of the second story is the “Upper West Side”, the 14-screen theater and food court on the fourth floor is the “Theater District”). Still, the best things about malls to my mind – eerie acoustics, awkward fountains, and the sad areas surrounding shuttered franchises – are not as impressive here than at your local Westfield Shoppingtown.

Cheesy cacophony at the Mall of America.

Where the Mall fails, the Metrodome succeeds: its decaying concrete and plastics surround a vast empty space that give voice to their message of Midwestern humility and utilitarianism, the garish May sunlight turned appropriately grim by the semi-translucent dome. The almost claustrophobic walkways emphasize the vastness of the playing field, on which unfolds a slow game comprised mostly of stillness, performed at the highest level by a workaday Twins squad that still somehow embodies these Midwestern values. I was happy to see DH Jason Kubel, son of my former piano tuner in Los Angeles, excelling for the Twins, but the real standout was Royals closer Joakim Soria. Watching him warm and throw the ninth was similar to seeing Mehldau the next night – all the elements align to allow a normal person to function on a level beyond their colleagues, everyone quietly acknowledging the rarity of such ability.

A dated style is endearing in the Metrodome’s last season hosting the Twins.

Turning to Mehldau’s trio, it was especially instructive to see him perform on the Dakota’s Yamaha piano, as I often wonder how much of his unique tone is attributable to his choice in piano (perhaps just as worthy an artistic element as touch anyhow). This piano was certainly bright, and brightened further by the PA, but Mehldau is so gentle with the bottom of the keybed, and has such precision even at the quietest dynamics, that it still had the warm concert hall resonance of his more recognizable Steinway tone. Although it wasn’t the most inspired set I’ve seen them play, Larry Grenadier was a standout, playing clearly conceived ideas with intonation as excellent and as personal as Charlie Haden’s. I met plenty of Minneapolis jazz musicians at this show and they were universally warm and positive about their local scene, which was refreshing. When we were chatting with the band and management afterwards, I thought about how Mehldau is one of the only young jazz musicians that I still see as a legend more than a colleague, and that felt so thoroughly healthy that, although I felt silly for it, I sipped my beer and chatted with the other guys rather than introduce myself to him. Though many people I work with or know are heroes of mine, it’s still nice to have a still have a hero in the way I did before I was a working musician too.

Stillwater, Minnesota is an “International Book Town”, in fact the first North American town to be so named, following the original Book Town, Hay-On-Wye in Scotland (insert sandwich joke here). I took a day trip along the St. Croix River to visit Stillwater and some local parks and towns, reveling in the familiar late-spring humidity and friendly woodsiness of the area and its similarity to my childhood home in central New York. Getting out into small-town America in a rental car, listening to Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey, my mind was quiet and turned to family, recalling the innumerable similar weekend trips I took with my family growing up in the Northeast. I can’t codify the particular lessons I learn from my solo travels the way I did when I was younger, but the lessons are still valuable. Being alone with myself with all the daily trappings of my adult life cast aside feels grounding. And if there’s one thing in life I’ve always known I wanted to do, it’s to travel America. What better time than now?

Stillwater, MN and sunset at MSP International Airport. I love my country.

Hi readers, Adam here again. In response to a veritable Flood of popular demand, we are going to be creating charts for a lot of Kneebody songs in the upcoming months. As you may know, one of the defining aspects of our band is that we learn everything by ear, so none of our songs have charts yet (although most have some composer’s scribbles somewhere). I will be creating PDF charts of many of the songs on our upcoming album, to be released when the album comes out. I also plan on doing a handful of older songs, so now is the time to put in requests if there are any Kneebody songs you want to see charts to! Just leave comments after this post, and if there is sufficient interest in a song, I’ll create a chart for it. Tell your friends, be the first on the block to collect the entire set.

Just got back from our trip to Denver and Minneapolis. It was all so great to get together with everyone and play and also see Denver and a new city where we’ve never played before. When we arrived in Denver, I went for an ambitious jog through my mom’s neighborhood. I came back exhilarated that I weathered the high altitude but later was disappointed that my left knee started to ache considerably. We had dinner at my mom’s house, watched a little bit of the Nuggets/Hornets game and later headed to the radio station KUVO with my friend Matt Seres to do an interview for our show at Dazzle. It’s always great to get to drive through Denver, retracing the route to KUVO that I used to take back when I was seventeen to DJ there overnight on fridays. We got there and had an interview with DJ Joshua Trinidad, a great person and musician. He’s been hosting a show there for the past few years and has always been so welcoming to us, playing our music and promoting our shows. We followed that with a killer chocolate shake at the Denver Diner on Speer and Colfax. Sitting there, we got to see Nuggets fans speeding down the street celebrating the team’s victory. The next morning, we were up early at six thirty to make it across town to teach a couple hours at Legacy High school. We worked with some great young musicians teaching them Shane’s song “The Slip” and playing improvisation games. We then headed south to another high school, Highland Ranch High School and played for students there. They had a concert that night and played some of the music they were rehearsing for us. I got together for a lesson with a young bass player, Sam Zarrin who’s father Ali is close friends with my father. Sam sounds great. Our sets at Dazzle that night were great. Now they have a full back line, drums, rhodes and bass amp are there already so we didn’t need to do the usual driving around to borrow friends’ equipment (thanks Daren and Derek, Mark and others for so many years of help in that department). The next morning, we flew to Minnesota. Minneapolis was amazing. This is the town where I bought my P bass five or six years ago. We’ve all been excited to play here. Our friends in the band Happy Apple are from here and they told us about the Dakota. Our visit was short but was great. We played at the Dakota Jazz club (www.dakotacooks.com). This is a true great modern jazz club. These people are all so dedicated and great there. When we arrived, a combo was playing. It was a sax player, bassist and pianist. They were celebrating the saxophonist’s 90th birthday. That’s right, the man was turning 90 and he sounded wonderful. They all sounded so good. They played “What’s New” and it was killing… We played to a really great crowd there. Two sets. Thank you to our friends who made it and brought their friends, Shari Mohabir, Ali Franzen, and Jared Hankins. We appreciate it so much. After we played, saxophonist Brandon Wozniak (http://www.myspace.com/brandonwozniak) played with a trio (guitar and drums). They sounded fantastic. Again reminding me that the best music is everywhere. Late after the gig, Shane and I took a cab around the corner to see my friends Colin Hay (www.colinhay.com) and Ace Baker who were in Minneapolis for a solo concert Colin was performing. We had a nightcap there and made it back to the hotel, slept a few hours and woke and headed to the airport for home. Now, we’re recharging and will be back in New York next month for our workshop at SIM (www.SchoolForImprov.org).

Hi Everyone,

For those of you who play music and want to participate in a one week workshop lead by Kneebody, we will be doing a residency at SIM (The School for Improvisation Music) in June. The program will be open to all instruments and all skill levels – preformed groups are welcome. In past residencies, the school has seen everything from highschool and college players up to adult hobbyists and retired pros. Here is all the info – deadline for applying is May 1st!

DATE/TIME:
June 15th to the 19th, 2009 11am to 5pm each day

TUITION:
$550 for the week (includes two lessons with any member during week)

LOCATION:
Brooklyn, NY

WEBSITES:
www.SchoolForImprov.org
(Click on ‘SIM Workshops’, then ‘Kneebody Intensive Faculty and Schedule’)
www.Kneebody.com
www.myspace.com/Kneebody

REGISTRATION/QUESTIONS:
Contact Ralph or Areni at: info@schoolforimprov.org

DEADLINE: May 1st, 2009

ABOUT SIM:
Founded by Trumpeter Ralph Alessi, the School for Improvisational Music (SIM) is the instructional facet of CIM for aspiring students of creative music. SIM has held 12 intensive workshops since 2001, attended by 500 students from over 10 countries. The SIM faculty consists of a cross-section of the most creative improvisers from the jazz and contemporary music fields.

What a cool performance. The pairing reminds me of Caetano Veloso using drummers from Bahia on his albums and in his concerts. I love the shot towards the end of some of those USC guys playing. They look psyched! Holy crap dude, we’re jamming with Radiohead!

Here’s Caetano playing the song Tropicalia. So badass. I saw him on that tour. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Jaques Morlenbaum playing the cello is so inspiring. He plays and improvises exactly how I’d like to play the bass.

We’ve done this collaboration a number of times. It’s always been such a cool show. We’ll be playing our last show of 2008 with Busdriver, a super creative and amazing MC from here in LA at the Little Temple tonight. We’ll start the night paying his music with him and finish the night with a Kneebody set. Badass!

I can’t believe that he’s gone. RIP, one of the greatest drummers EVER!

It’s the morning of November 5th, 2008. For some of us it feels like waking up hung over from an amazing party. Last night we elected a new president. I’m really proud of our country. The older I get and the more I get to travel and read history, the more I appreciate and respect our system of government. I’m in awe of the way that in the midst of two wars and an economic crisis, our country can step aside, respect the framework of our system and peacefully elect a new government. For similarly powerful countries in the world, regime change could require blood to be shed and at minimum chaos. But I was really amazed at the way that it seemed everyone put their differences aside and respected the outcome. John McCain made an amazing and eloquent concession speech. He showed the respect and dignity of someone who deserved to be running in a presidential race. His words and example I think will help to heal the divide that exists in our country. Obama’s speech was amazing! It was a really great night!In addition to the election, I’m also extremely disappointed that California voted for Proposition 8. It sends a paranoid and unfair message and I think will be looked back on by everyone as injustice. Prop 8 was disguised as an initiative that was for family values and pro-children when it was really homophobia and bigotry. I think that California is more of a complicated state than people think. And also that LA County who voted unanimously for the measure is also misunderstood as socially progressive.

Hi Everyone,

This Tuesday Kneebody will be playing at The Temple Bar. It’s going
to be our last concert there and it will probably the last time I’ll
ever play at The Temple Bar because they’ve announced that they’ll be
closing at the end of this month.

It’s been really strange thinking about that over the past week. The
Temple Bar has always been here while I’ve been living in Los Angeles.
They opened the year I moved here. Before it was the Temple Bar, the
bar at 1026 Wilshire was called At My Place. I never knew it as that
but I heard that in the seventies, while he was here in LA living his
“lost weekend”, John Lennon played there.

My friends and I were some of first bunch of musicians playing at The
Temple Bar when they opened. For the first few years I think that I
was there almost every night of the week; sometimes playing in three
bands in a night. At least it felt that way. I was there when we
put together a 20 growing to 30 eventually making it to a 70 piece
orchestra filling the bar. I played with some of my childhood heros
there. I was also there on many nights playing duets or trios with
singer songwriters. I also heard some of the most world class
inspiring live music I’ve ever heard there.

Early on, the owners Louie and Nettie Ryan and their booking agent
Megan Jacobs created an atmosphere that embraced the music scene and
the musicians that helped create it. There were many times when
Louie and Nettie would tell me and everyone else that we were all
family. That was their way to nurture and reassure all of us. And it
really did make me feel special to know that in this giant sprawling
city at the edge of this big continent, there was a place where we
could all play, anytime we wanted. We all felt how special it was.
And with music communities being as close as they are, word spread
quickly. Soon, the Temple Bar became a great destination for touring
bands from other parts of the country and the world.

Kneebody, in it’s earliest stage played there every Monday. It was
during the time of those Mondays that we were able to write and learn
a lot of our songs. It was a weekly composition deadline for us to
write new music and try it in front of an audience. If we didn’t
have that comfortable workshop environment, I’m not sure what the
band would sound like today or if the band would still exist.

Over the years, everyone started getting busier and busier.
Between spending time on the road, in the studio or just being
somewhere else that life has taken me, there have been bigger
intervals between my gigs there. The Temple Bar has always been a
place that I’ve kept coming back to. It definitely has been that way
for Kneebody. It’s always been the best Los Angeles venue for us.
And because of how easy it’s been to play there, it’s been a palce
that we’ve kind of taken for granted. We’ve been able to create some
great nights of double and triple bills there inviting our friends
from out of town to play with us. It’s going to be tough to find a
new place to play.

I want to say that for the record, I’m very happy to have played
there and am grateful to Louie, Nettie, Dexter, Swan and everyone
else of the The Temple Bar cast over the years. Thank you all so
much. It will be hard to picture anything else there at 11th and
Wilshire.

Here’s the info…

@ THE TEMPLE BAR
Nels Cline w/Norton Wisdom
Todd Sickafoose’s Blood Orange (featuring Jenny Scheinman)
Kneebody (Minus Shane)

Tuesday, September 9th
$10
ALL AGES
Doors open at 8pm
1026 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles
Info/Tickets: 310.393.6611 or www.templebarlive.com

OK, I’m on a Paul Simonon binge right now. I think he’s my favorite bass player. I can’t stop listening to The Good The Bad and The Queen. It’s a really great artist collaboration record. DangerMouse is the producer. He never over does it. The songs are all there, bare elements and bits of sound and beats that sit perfectly. The guys playing are really showcased. You can hear where they put beats how they phrase and what notes they choose… It’s a total Paul album. His bass lines are right there in the front of every song and they are stark and beautiful. Also his illustrations are very very cool. I just read an interview with him in bass player (www.bassplayer.com/article/paul-simonon/Aug-03/784). In it he reveals a lot about his relationship to music through the Clash and the reggae he was always drawn towards. Listening to this reminds me of talking to my buddy Lonnie Marshall who played bass with Joe Strummer on the album “Earthquake Weather” after the Clash officially dissolved. He said that when they played in London on that tour, people would yell at him on stage and yell “Where’s Paul??!!!”. He said that later when they were playing in Japan, he finally ran into him at a show and that Paul was a really nice sweet guy.

I remember when Siskel and Ebert dedicated an episode of one of their shows to films of the seventies. At one point during the show, Siskel said that the 1970’s were the last great era of film. Among others, his reasons were that back then, studios were dedicating budgets to film makers to tell any kind of story they wanted to pursue. That is why you had really interesting and strange stories with big name actors being shot beautifully. My Dad and I watched “Fat City” tonight. It was a movie made in 1972 by John Huston. Its about two boxers at very different points of their lives. From the opening scene with the location dissolves of Stockton (below) I said that I already love the movie. Stacy Keach and a young Jeff Bridges are in it. My Dad said that Huston was a boxer at one point and at different stages of his life, he had all sorts of strange odd jobs. This is a really great movie with a story that could have been written by Bukowski.

Fergie, Beyonce, Ashlee Simpson, Clay Aiken, Jennifer Lopez, Celine Dion, Akon, Soljah Boy, Jay Z, Mariah Cary….This was from a show filmed in 1969. These were two popular artists. The United States had been at war for four or five years. What has changed? Was America smarter then? Is it really this impossible to see relevant, amazing and unique artists on television performing and completely owning a song? I think that these clips are beautiful and sad at the same time!!

Johnny wrote this song for his first wife Vivian. This is footage from a concert in 1959 about seven years after he got out of the airforce.

Nate and I were asked to play drums and bass for the band Hour Of The Shipwreck (http://www.myspace.com/houroftheshipwreck) last night. This is a band that plays music written by Richie Kohan. Marcel Camargo played as well as Alex (last name soon to be learned…!) on keyboards and Richie playing electric 12 string and singing. Really pretty chords and patient and brooding music. Loud picked bass… It was a lot of fun for me to channel my inner Chris Squire.We played at the Knitting Factory here in Los Angeles. We were opening for the band Faun Fables. I was excited to see them because I had heard them before. Abby and Amanda from the Ditty Bops showed me one of their albums on tour. I really loved how it sounded as well as the voice of the singer Dawn Macarthy. Beautiful pagan punk hobbit music! Anyhow, I ended up buying one of their CDs called the “Transit Rider” which I soon lost. So it was cool to be able to get something else of theirs and get to see them perform last night. Despite the sound being pretty rough with mics feeding back and acoustic instruments not being miced well enough, their music was really cool to hear and I liked their performance a lot. Here is a cool video for one of their songs:

Every year there are albums that define the chapters of my life. I guess that was kind of a cheesy sentence… It’s not rocket science. Everyone has music in their lives that will alwyas be linked to memories and will bring specific feelings every time they hear it. When I went to Brasil, everyone working with the band I was with down there, the Brazilians, were telling me about music they were excited about. I came back from that trip with about thirty cds. Tons of Caetano Veloso, Milton Nasciemento, Jaques Morlenbaum, Tim Maya, Ed Motta, Tom Ze, Gal Costa, and samba school cds… Another album that had just come out out there that everyone was telling me about was Tribalistas. This was a super collaboration album with Marisa Monte, Carlinhos Brown, and Arnaldo Antunes. These are all singers the Brazilians love. Big artists. I remember first hearing Carlinhos Brown years and years ago. I first heard him on that great album Bill Laswell produced for the Axiom label called Ritual Beating System. At the time, he was the young Brazilian Salvador answer to all the hip hop music I liked at the time. Artists like De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest… Marisa Monte is someone that everyone down there loves. Whenever you mention her name people sigh and shake their head. She’s that good. Arnaldo Atunes is someone that I knew the least about. Everyone was talking about that album. I didn’t get a chance to pick it up on that trip and it wasn’t until last December that I got back there again and bought it. It’s one of those albums that gets you right away with the way it’s recorded. The sound of those three voices together! Why does it sound so good? One of the reasons if that they are singing an octave apart!!! So cool. Atunes sings the low parts. His voice is so low and the tone is so thick that it sounds like a solid thing. It’s just beauty and it really grows on you the more you hear it. The song O Amor e Feio just popped up on Itunes and I remember driving with Ang to Arizona or driving with the The Ditty Bops and Jesca Hoop from San Francisco. Definitely pick this up! And here they are:

This video came in courtesy of Shane. He said that he’s been in a Miles phase lately, and checking out a lot of stuff. The main comment he noticed and pointed out to us was the look Miles shoots Herbie early on in the video. Holy shit!

Great show the other night at the Temple Bar. It was one of those nights that had a lot of meaning. Most times should have meaning I guess but this was really cool. It just stressed the importance to me of doing something yourself. The idea for the show came came from talking to Wayne Krantz after we had shared a night with him in New York a few months back at the Knitting Factory. That night turned out really well. Both bands fit well on the bill together. For us it’s always really special to be able to share a night with other groups we like. It always ends up being really inspiring. After that gig we told Wayne that if he ever came to LA to let us know and that we would love to set something up with him out here. It was great that he ended up calling a few weeks later telling us that he was coming out. We chose to do the night at the Temple Bar because that’s a place that we’ve been playing at since they opened. Louie, Netty, and Dexter there have always been so generous and welcoming and it really has been a home for us musically over the years. Once we proposed the show, they suggested the idea of adding another band on the bill. We thought instantly of Nels doing a solo set. Fortunately he was free! He’s always so busy. And when he’s not, he’s always into doing something cool! Endless energy I guess. Anyway, the day of the show, Nels mentioned that Norton Wisdom, the painter would be available and would be into performing as well. He and Nels have a duo together. Anyway the night was amazing I thought. Not sure if I could give a rundown of the music on Wednesday or if it’s really necessary to but I guess I could say that it had all of the elements that I used to love putting into the radio show I used to do back in Denver. Nels and Norton played some brilliant stuff. I walked into the club and everyone was close to the stage while more people were coming into the club from outside. It was a perfect start to the night and I was honored to go on after them.. We rocked I thought. We were Shane less for the first time! That was crazy. He had some important family business to attend to and was missed! At the same time, there was interesting space in the group that we were all not used to that made for some crazy moments! It had the feel of the other “quartet kneebody” gigs. Frantic town! Like the time I was lying in a fever behind the curtain of the stage in South Dakota or when Adam was upstairs from the club puking after spending time in the emergency room in Bologna… It was a blast rehearsing for that night. The guys in the band are truly my musical brothers. Sometimes I don’t realize how much I miss playing with them until we play. Wayne played later and the band played great great great. Sonic relentless sounds. Very loud and wonderful and dynamic!!! Nels ran up to Wayne afterwards and said “Thank God for Rhythm!”. Thank you so much to everyone who made it out. I really feel thankful that you all came and also thankful to Nels, Wayne and the other performers for making it. Thanks to Swan for being a wonderful accomodating (ALWAYS HAS BEEN) sound engineer and a sweet person. And thanks to the very tall woman who was dancing like a maniac while Wayne was playing! That’s really what it is all about sometimes! You were the shit! I love things like that. You never imagined them happening and there they are happening. I’m really glad it happened. It could have not happened, but it did.

Hey Everyone, Things have been good and busy lately. The first thing that I want to let you know about is this great ALL AGES show that Kneebody has coming up this week in Santa Monica. We’ll be playing a triple bill with Nels Cline and Wayne Krantz (featuring Tal Wilkenfeld and Cliff Almond). The night will be like a mini festival. Nels is going to start the night with a solo guitar set. If you havn’t seen him do this before, I recommend it. I had the experience when I was on tour with Nels and Carla Bozulich a while back of being able to hear him open each night playing solo. It was always new and different and really exciting. Kneebody will play after him. And we will deliver!!! After us Wayne is gonna play. We played a double bill with him a couple months ago in New York. That was such a fun night. He and his trio rocked so hard. It will be a great opportunity to hear this great musician who is usually based on the east coast, play out here. NELS CLINE – 8:30PMKNEEBODY- 9:30 PMWAYNE KRANTZ (featuring TAL WILKENFELD and CLIFF ALMOND) – 10:30 PM@ The Temple BarWednesday, May 21st (doors open at 8pm)1026 Wilshire BlvdSanta Monica, CA$10presale available atwww.templebarlive.com or 310.393.6611www.kneebody.comwww.nelscline.comwww.waynekrantz.com

My cousin sent me this link. Its very cool to see and it’s not that surprising. Break dancing in Tehran. I think that this is some of the positive that the internet can provide. If we look just a little bit beyond what is normally fed to us and with our own eyes get past the stigmas and fear and everything, we can see the good stuff. When we were in New York last year participating at APAP, the arts presenters conference, Nate and I saw some awesome break dancers. It reminds me of what these guys are doing. Thanks Afsheen.Another thing I would recommend to see or read regarding the current situation in Iran is the film or the graphic novels “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi. It’s her story that is funny sad and great at the same time. kaveh

I’ve been on a youtube craze for the past hour. It started with looking up Ron Wood and Keith Richards. Then it went through some live Return To Forever clips. There are some with Chick looking like a sailor. And now I’m here. This band was so badass.

kaveh

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.

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.”

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.

To recap: We had a great set of shows with Happy Apple in California. Their music as well as the way they play together is really inspiring. Unfortunately I only have a couple of pictures from these shows. If anyone has anything, send them our way. I hope that we can do more shows like that sometime in the future. Next up are a couple of shows in Colorado. We’ll be playing in Boulder as well as a show in Denver. In Jaunary, things are coming together and it looks like we’ll have another show at the 55 Bar in Manhattan as well as another Italy tour.

Here’s some great footage of the Bill Frisell band playing with Ron Miles, Greg Tardy, Kenny Wolleson and Tony Scherr, as well as a solo piece by Bill.

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

Hey folks, we have a tour coming up next week that I’m really excited about. We’ll be playing three shows with the Minneapolis band Happy Apple. All three shows are all ages. Here’s the info:

-KNEEBODY @ THE TEMPLE BAR
(ALL AGES SHOW)
Monday, November 5th
1026 Wilshire Blvd
Santa Monica, CA
$10
presale available at
www.templebarlive.com or 310.393.6611

-KNEEBODY @ KUUMBWA JAZZ CENTER
(ALL AGES SHOW)
Tuesday, November 6th
320-2 Cedar Street
Santa Cruz, CA
$20
presale available at
www.kuumbwajazz.org or 831.427.2227

-KNEEBODY @ GREAT AMERICAN MUSIC HALL
SAN FRANCISCO JAZZ FESTIVAL
(ALL AGES SHOW)
Wednesday, November 7th
859 O’Farrell Street
San Francisco, CA
$25
presale available at
www.gamh.com or 415.885.0750

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)

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.

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.

The Future Of Instrumental Music
April 12th, 2007
Denver Westword

Kneebody has had many labels thrown at it, but none seem to fit. That said, the members of the transcontinental quintet (whose new album, Low Electrical Worker, is due next month) haven’t exactly gone out of their way to make it easy for folks to pin down their shapeshifting sound. Thanks to a system of musical cues they’ve developed that allows each player to tweak nearly any element of any given song — be it volume, orchestration, tempo or key — the act’s arrangements change constantly and zigzag through various vibes and moods. We asked trumpeter Shane Endsley to give Kneebody’s chameleon-esque style a name and to explain how he and his bandmates cue-municate with each other.

Westword: Say you’re talking with someone who’s never heard you guys before. How do you describe exactly what you do?

Shane Endsley: Well, if I have to give a quick answer, the thing that I’ve been saying is “electro-acoustic instrumental music.” I try to avoid the stylistic references. A lot of times, we’ve been labeled as funk jazz or fusion or post-jazz — all these different things. But nothing seems to ring well. So I’ve been saying electro-acoustic instrumental music. And hopefully that covers it.

I was reading about how you use musical cues, which I think you borrowed from Steve Coleman, right?

Yeah, he’s one of the guys I played with. He would do a couple of things. He had something that he would play for stopping the band and for changing tempo; there would be little things like that that would happen. That’s more of a direct influence. But it’s the kind of thing bands have been doing for a long time. Like, every band has its own language of cues for when it’s the last time, or when you’re going to vamp and all that stuff.

With our stuff, we’re just starting to think about it and trying to expand it into this, like, whole system that would encompass any element of the music you would desire to shift at any point if you were thinking as a producer or an arranger-type head. So now we’ve expanded it so that anybody can cue the music. It doesn’t have to all come from one person. And it can change anything, like volume, or the orchestration, or the tempo, the key — just trying to cover everything. Like if you’re on a vamp and want to cue chord changes, can you do that somehow? So there’s, like, twenty of them.

I also read that when you guys compose stuff, you don’t actually write anything down. So it’s all pretty much by memory?

Well, whoever wrote it usually has his sketch, so they can refer to it if we forget parts. But we don’t take the time to write lead sheets, usually, or parts, because we don’t use them. So usually someone has his little sketchpad, and they’re teaching the thing to everybody, one at a time. And then we try to learn each other’s part so that hopefully we can switch. As much as we can, we try to get the music more and more modular.

Kneebody at Moody’s
October 30th, 2006
Kneebody, an almost infinitely versatile quintet made up of Adam Benjamin (keyboards), Shane Endsley (trumpet), Kaveh Rastegar (bass), Ben Wendel (saxophone) and Nate Wood (drums), stopped by Moody’s Bistro & Lounge in Truckee for two free shows last weekend.

Though unmistakably a Modern Jazz band, the member of the group aren’t quite comfortable with that label.

“When we’re speaking to musicians, we try not to put a category to it because we feel like this isn’t really a category yet. When we talk to non-musicians we say it’s progressive instrumental jazz music. But ‘jazz’ is such a dangerous word at this point. Jazz covers 60 years of music, so ‘jazz’ could mean 100 different things,” Ben Wendel said during a break in between sets at Friday’s show. “But basically it’s a little bit of jazz, a little bit of classical, a little bit of hip-hop… and we put it all in the bag.”

At Moody’s, the band pulled a number of tricks out of its bag including a good deal of improvisation and some very creative solos. But it was the interaction among the players that drew the most appreciation from the University of Nevada, Reno jazz program students in the front row, as well as the patrons sitting at the noisier lounge bar.

As is always the case at Moody’s — which caters to a dinner crowd in the lounge until 9:30 or 10 p.m. — the band picked up the tempo and the volume as the night got older and the crowd loosened up.

“This is a 100-percent democratically-run band. Everybody has their thing, and they’re able to express it within the band, and we all come to a common place together,” Wendel said, adding, “It is more challenging, but in a way it’s better to have five band leaders, because you can go more directions.”

Just getting the band together can be somewhat challenging, for while four of the members live in Los Angeles, trumpet player Shane Endsley hails from New York City. But while living on the opposite coast can make it harder to join the rest of the band for practice sessions, Endsley said that the New York connection also brings another element to Kneebody’s sound.

“When they come out to New York, there is just so much music there; it really is the most concentrated place for especially newer music and adventurous stuff. So when they get there, they’re really amped up and catch a lot of music when they go out. So it influences the rest of the guys too when they come into town. So I think New York does have a pretty big influence, and that kind of balances out the one-to-four ratio in the band.”

The Kneebody shows were part of Moody’s co-owner JJ Morgan’s continuing attempt to build the club into a fixture of the jazz scene in Truckee and Tahoe by bringing in a nationally recognized act each month. And while Kneebody likely won’t be back through town anytime soon, you can hear more of their music online at www.ColorToneMedia.com.

Tahoe World – Paul Raymore

Kneebody Gets Jazzy at Modified
July 27th, 2006
Kneebody no longer toils in the jazz-anonymity abyss reserved for many modern-creative contemporary groups. In 2005, the 10-year-strong spontaneous jazz/rock/funk ensemble released a self-titled debut on pioneering jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas’ Greenleaf Music label, and “the response has been wonderful,” says bass player Kaveh Rastegar. The album, he says, “has really put us on the map.”
On Monday, July 31, the five-piece band will show off its brand of fiery sonic spontaneity at Modified Arts. The group’s freewheeling live performances move seamlessly from Herbie Hancock Sextant-inspired free funk to robust Bitches Brew rock-fusion to unlabeled avant-garde styles, all the more impressive considering that not all the members call Los Angeles their home (trumpeter Shane Endsley lives in New York City), thus making consistent rehearsals a luxury. “We have a long history together, and most of the music is memorized,” says Rastegar, also a founding member of the 70-piece hip-hop orchestra daKAH who has gigged with Nels Cline and Carla Bozulich. “We are all just so psyched to be part of the band, and I think it shows during our concerts.” Fusion phenoms Trio Oro will open the show.

Phoenix New Times – Steve Jansen

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

Westword
December 8th, 2005

Giving the modern jazz world a much-needed kick in the ass, Kneebody has assembled a quirky brand of improv-based crossover jazz that’s as refreshing as it is expressive. The New York/Los Angeles-based quintet’s sound, which borrows equally from traditional jazz, hip-hop, rock and electronica, is anchored by hard-hitting beats and bass lines and tastefully bolstered by soulful ’60s horn lines and ambient electronic noises. This unique approach reflects the diversity and experience of the individual members (keyboardist Adam Benjamin, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, drummer Nate Wood, saxman Ben Wendel and trumpeter Shane Endsley, a Denver native) — who collectively have backed an assortment of artists such as Snoop Dogg, Ani DiFranco, Chaka Khan and Ravi Coltrane, among others. And unlike a lot of neo-jazz fusion groups, Kneebody’s penchant for the groove never gets tedious. Although the players are apt to change keys or tempos at will — they’ve developed a unique system of cues that they employ live to keep the arrangements fresh and evolving — you don’t have to wade through ten-minute-long atonal freakouts just to get back to the original jam.

Shawn Bauer

All About Jazz
December 7th, 2005
Kneebody

When trumpeter Dave Douglas parted ways with RCA/Bluebird—which released his projects between 2000 and 2004—he created Greenleaf Music to allow him better control over both his art and its delivery. He also planned to bring exposure to other artists. The first non-Douglas release on the new label, the self-titled debut by Kneebody, fits perfectly with Douglas’ view that music should transcend labels and artificial stylistic restrictions.

A quintet of players who have worked with artists as diverse as Ani DiFranco, Snoop Dogg, and Steve Coleman, Kneebody brings that very diversity to its own music, combining focused yet vivid improvisational interplay with detailed writing, and a sonic palette ranging from the purely acoustic to the outrageously electric. While it’s not a fusion band by any standard definition, Kneebody’s trans-genre approach is nevertheless fusion in the broader sense of the word. Much like Lost Tribe—the 1990s band which ultimately brought significant attention to its members, including saxophonist David Binney, guitarist Adam Rogers, and drummer Ben Perowsky—Kneebody manages to combine visceral groove with cerebral musical ideas, making its arrival on the scene a significant one.

With the exception of drummer Nate Wood, everyone in the quintet—keyboardist Adam Benjamin, trumpeter Shane Endsley, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and saxophonist Ben Wendel—contributes compositions to the disc, but it’s remarkable how unified the band’s vision remains. While it’s difficult to avoid comparisons to Lost Tribe, Kneebody retains a sound all its own, with an even broader stylistic purview. But the way that Endsley and Wendl’s lines intertwine—winding, snakelike, between unison and harmonies that range from close to open—begs comparison to the knotty writing of Binney and Rogers.

While there’s a strong funk element, it’s often with an aggressive edge that clearly leans more towards rock territory. Benjamin’s “Never Remember” shifts from a pedal-to-the-metal groove by Wood and Rastegar to a middle section that’s lighter in texture, before heading into a hard-hitting outro featuring Benjamin’s distorted Wurlitzer. Endsley’s “I’m Your General” finds Benjamin feeding his electric piano through a ring modulator and Rastegar’s fuzz-toned bass referencing ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper. Rastegar’s evocative ballad “Victory Lap,” with its memorable theme, proves that Kneebody can relax the pace and approach the lyrical with equal intent.

With nearly half of the album’s dozen tracks under three minutes, one might expect a compositional focus. Still, Rastegar’s one-minute “Wide-Eyed”—a trumpet/bass/drums trio—is more about interplay, whereas Wendel’s “Clime Pt. I” and “Pt II” both blur the line, with clearly detailed horn lines resting over the more open-ended electronic backdrop created by Benjamin, Rastegar, and Wood.

With Kneebody’s intrepid collage of influences, Douglas’ interest in the group will come as no surprise. Purists will undoubtedly be offended by Kneebody’s blending of technology into the mix, not to mention the group’s sometimes aggressive rock stance; but for those who want to hear how the jazz vernacular is being reshaped and the improvisational spirit re-contextualized, Kneebody is a band—and an album—well worth checking out.

All About Jazz – December Issue – By John Kelman

Downbeat
August 1st, 2005
Kneebody: Creating A New Language

At first, it seems that Kneebody chose a name that intentionally invited anonymity. After speaking to a couple members of the quintet, it becomes clear that they also took a firm stance against presenting a single bandleader. Equally crucial is that they wanted to invent a word that conveys no preconceived musical connotations.
“It’s a nonsense word that my girlfriend came up with,” said saxophonist Ben Wendel. “We wanted a short, memorable word with a nondefinable genre connection.”
This collaborative dismissal of categorical purity runs throughout Kneebody’s self-titled debut on Greenleaf Music. Serene keyboard and woodwind lines are played on top of driving rock drums. Orchestrated electronic noise flows into classically formed melodies. Each musical shift is episodic, rather than merely contrasting.
Kneebody’s hybrids stem from influences on both American coasts. Wendel met trumpeter Shane Endsley, keyboardist Adam Benjamin and bassist Kaveh Rastegar when they all attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., during the late 1990′s. As the individual musicians migrated among different jazz, rock and hip-hop groups, they performed together as a part of a weekly residency at the Temple Bar in Santa Monica, Calif., with drummer Nate Wood. “We basically wanted to do stuff that was less about standard form,” Wendel said.
All of which requires some rules to make it continually interesting. So Kneebody created their own. Along with the musicians’ compositions, they devised a language based on musical cues that each intrumentalist recognizes as a signal for immediately changing direction.
Endsley describes how this works in terms of his composition “Break Me”. “I wanted to have a middle section where we overdub these different layers and there’s these short things going in and out,” Endsley said. “So it’s faster paced than what would normally be a solo section where it’s one person at a time standing. We jump in and out and on top of each other, like people playing drum ‘n’ bass, but not with that stylistic sound.”
While most of Kneebody has remained in the Los Angeles area, Endsley lives in Brooklyn. Trumpeter Dave Douglas started paying attention to him a few years ago and then asked if he had any projects for his recently launched Greenleaf Music label. As it happened, Kneebody had just finished recording its CD and Endsley presented it to Douglas.
“Their music is a great direction for jazz musicians to go,” Douglas said. “It’s spontaneous and exciting. The writing is fresh, and the way they integrate it with improvising is unique.”

-Aaron Cohen

Jazz Times CD Review
July 30th, 2005
The members of Kneebody have collectively logged hours with such a range of artists – Ani DiFranco to David Murray to Jurassic 5 – that it’s tempting to write them off as another multi-hypenate in jazz’s crossover era. But eclecticism isn’t the point of their music, which sounds too convincingly effortless to be a self-conscious fusion. In fact, their debut on Dave Douglas’ new label reinforces just how meaningless the F-word has become.

Kneebody bolts out the gate with “Break Me,” a fuzz-tone funk tune by
trumpeter Shane Endsley that twists through a quick succession of formal convolutions. This immediately established the band’s rhythmic prowess: Bassist Kaveh Rastegar, keyboardist Adam Benjamin and drummer Nate Wood establish a pocket and hold it tight, no matter what else happens in a tune. And that’s saying a lot, considering that the band’s originals rarely seek the comfort of a straightforward groove. This is especially true of those by Endsley and tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel – like a stutter-stepping “Coat Rack” and a Return to Forever inspired “Never Remember.”

The full impact of Kneebody is in the ensemble. Their cohesive poise is what sells the experiment, which will hopefully yield another record
soon.

Jazz Times – Nate Chinen

The New York Times
June 24th, 2005
Rock, funk and electronic music commingle convincingly with jazz on “Kneebody” (Greenleaf), this quintet’s recent studio debut; it’s an update of the rugged, exploratory early fusion of Weather Report and Return to Forever, and just as likely to sound better live.

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

Kneebody gets funky at Modified
May 27th, 2005
Kneebody isn’t lacking in credibility, not with the L.A.-based, instrumental jazz-rock fusion quintet’s collective résumé that sports gigs with Ani DiFranco, Snoop Dogg, and jazz trumpet luminary Dave Douglas. Yet even with academic credentials from New York’s prestigious Eastman School of Music for four of Kneebody’s five members (the fifth, drummer Nate Wood, graduated from the California Institute of the Arts), it’s the band’s signing to Douglas’ Greenleaf Music label that gives the band’s self-titled debut CD its pedigree. While critics have had a difficult time pegging Kneebody’s style and sound — which mixes funky, off-tempo beats with the bouncing melodies of saxophones, trombones, keyboards and sonic bass lines — it might be just as hard for Kneebody’s burgeoning fan base to squeeze into Modified Arts.

Phoenix New Times – Joe Watson

Kneebody
May 26th, 2005
The energy and excitement projecting from this quintet
is unlike anything I have seen before… and they
capture it ALL on their self-titled CD to the point
where it’s surprising that it’s a multi-tracked
recording vs. live. Though difficult to describe,
Kneebody have almost a super-groove-oriented John Zorn
Naked City vibe without the total chaos. They have an
organized, precision style to their challenging runs
that’s driven home with ultra-pocket drummer Nate
Wood. The total standout thrilling quality of
Kneebody, though, is the synchronicity within the
group. It’s like they are playing with a collective
consciousness. Ben Wendel on sax and Shane Endsley on
trumpet play in complete unison. It’s like listening
to The Borg from Star Trek playing experimental,
instrumental jazz. This is challenging music for both
player and listener, but, amidst the calculated
confusion, it FEELS like it’s working, and repeated
listens make it make sense. NOTE: Not for people with
nervous disorders. This stuff is wild!

METRO LA Magazine

AOL Cityguide
May 10th, 2005
Ear to the Ground, Editor’s Picks: New Millennial Groove

They’ve backed Ani DiFranco, Snoop Dogg and Jurassic 5. (Yes, this is jazz.) With members based in both New York and L.A., Kneebody knows a thing or two about reaching across divides. The band’s self-titled debut bridges the gap between jazz, rock and hip-hop, stirring up a truly creative cauldron of new-millennial groove.

Nobody Can Label Kneebody
April 23rd, 2005
I’ve listened to the music of kneebody several times, and it’s something I can’t easily categorize. Is it indie fusion? Alternative wordless funk infused with inventive solo statements? Or because the group employs daring improvisations and evokes any number of originals from John Zorn’s Naked City to Carla Bley, maybe it’s best billed as jazz. “This is ‘new instrumental’ music,” says Shane Endsley, a Park Hill native whose trumpet tears through many a skillful solo on kneebody’s self-titled debut CD. “It’s jazz-oriented, but I don’t think of it as ‘jazz,’ really. If I say it’s jazz to the KUVO audience, they’d be surprised at our shows.” I’d argue that the more open-minded KUVO listener would find much to admire in kneebody’s work, particularly its smart arrangements and rockish song structures, which, on disc, provide for many engaging moments. The CD is one of the most striking debut efforts in recent memory, and it’s been awarded a pedigree of sorts by being released on the Greenleaf Music label, which is run by cutting-edge trumpeter Dave Douglas. The signing to Douglas’ label was “kind of lucky,” according to Endsley. “He saw me (perform) on a good night and then called me out of nowhere” in search of a new project for his label. As it turned out, the kneebody disc was already finished. “We had recorded it in bits and pieces on our own. But releasing it on Greenleaf will help us with the credibility thing.” Endsley is another Colorado-bred musician seeking his fortunes away from home. He lives in New York for family reasons while the rest of kneebody is based in Los Angeles. “It’s a little frustrating because we want to play together a lot (this week’s Dazzle shows will be their first performances as a group since the disc was released last month). But luckily it hasn’t been too much of a hindrance.” Before New York, he was part of the L.A. music scene, which he claims includes many a Denver-area native. “Denver’s making a big mark,” he says of Los Angeles. “Other musicians call players from Colorado the ‘Denver Mafia.”‘ One of Endsley’s compositions on the CD is titled “Break Me.”

By Bret Saunders
Denver Post

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

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

La Music Scene Online
June 15th, 2004
Kneebody@ the Temple Bar
“Hip’s Hip”
by: the Amish Gangster

Kneebody is the future. At the Temple Bar, the audience consumed the mesmerizing organic grooves. This outstanding ensemble told an evocative story with a single, unified pulse to every single person in the room, at the bar and standing outside on the sidewalk – possibly even some across the street and down the block.

Kneebody is one band trapped in five people’s bodies, each forming a tantalizing whole by the time it meets the ear. Kaveh Rastegar levitates on Bass, and if you don’t know what a bass is, look for the tall guy with the mischievous smile. He’d be the one laying down the grooves and sending out the “Check this out” vibe. On drums was Scott Seiver reinventing the pocket and, best of all, LISTENING! To complete the rhythm section, Adam Benjamin performed on Fender Rhodes with all the style, fluid finesse and virtue of the monster acts he’s toured with (Charlie Haden, Bob Brookmeyer, and Benny Carter). The horns players are the band’s namesakes Ben Wendel on Saxamaphone, and Shane Endsley on Trumpet. This powerful combination reminds me of Wynton and Branford Marsalis giving anyone who listens the feeling that they have played together their whole lives, complementing and enhancing each other’s notes, to their fullest potential.

The music was awe inspiring and reminiscent of Charlie Hunter’s Quartet but with an undeniable Hip-Hop element not dissimilar to D’Angelo’s Voodoo. Indeed the music lends itself to few outside influences and can only be traced to each member striving for the next level of creativity and musicianship. The set opened with “Song 4″ beginning with a short, repeated phrase, which later graduated and expanded using the same theme. The repeated phrase became the ostinato in the rhythm section. The groove was so tight it sounded like the best take of a studio session, with perfect time, pensiveness and surgical accuracy in each note. Without introduction, the group began new feels and directions into tunes with brand new sycopations and abstract feel which slowly melted into an intense piece of audio therapy. At this point we entered the realm of absolute captivation and meditation… to the light, to the light! Although the music had the personal stamp of each player, it was as if a musical Ouija board were guiding the hands (and feet) of the bandmates. Nobody had a clue, even them, about where it would end up. Except that they did. Winding towards the close of the already short set, the horns began somber and quiet long tones tricking the audience into a thinking a ballad was eminent…enter the drums with a high-paced and busy jungle beat. Even my Mother couldn’t sit still. By this time, we all felt that we had somehow experienced some new musical (and mathematical) truth.

Kneebody has an epic, transgenerational gravity. As a reviewer I’m supposed to point out the things I like and don’t like about a group. In this case I am at a loss, this is the best band I have seen in Los Angeles and there was nothing I didn’t like. Be sure to see them before they’re a legend.

Article by: the Amish Gangster
Submitted: Mid June, 2002
Email: amishG@thelamusicscene.com

All About Jazz – May Issue
May 3rd, 2004
You may have heard trumpeter Shane Endsley with
Mike McGinnis’ excellent group Between Green, or on
recordings by such far-flung artists as Steve Coleman
and Ani DeFranco. But if you havenít heard Endsley’s
freakishly talented quintet KneeBody, that needs to
change. These geographically separated, mainly
LA-based Eastman alums play in this area only about
once a year. The Jazz Gallery was kind enough to host
this year’s show on a Sunday (April 11th), when the
space is normally dark.
This amusing yet rigorous venture, which used to
be known as the Wendel-Endsley Group, features
Endsley with Ben Wendel on tenor sax, Adam
Benjamin on piano and Rhodes, Kaveh Rastegar on
electric bass and Nate Wood (of the rock band The
Calling) on drums. (Endsley also gigs as a drummer,
but not with this band.) All members write, and what
they write is impossibly intricate, often throughcomposed,
epic and funky, emphasizing the written
detail over the extended solo. Only none of
KneeBodyís material is ever written down. Every tune
sounds impeccably rehearsed, and yet the band rarely
does so. The solo sections, when they do crop up, are
not enviable things to blow over. Dousing the
listener in a flood of sonic and metric contrasts,
pounding, infectious grooves and turn-on-a-dime
endings, KneeBody announces itself as a jazz/rock
chamber group of the oddest sort. – David Adler

The La Music Scene Online
April 15th, 2004
Wendel-Endsley Group : Knitting Factory

Sexy. Smooth. Saavy. Seductive. Just a few adjectives to describe the Wendel-Endsley Group experience. A definite must see for any jazz/funk/avant garde/groove enthusiast. The music that culminates from Shane’s trumpet, Ben’s sax, Adam’s Rhodes, Kaveh’s bass, Scott’s drums and Davey’s percussion suspends time as you spend your evening grooving with the band. What is most amazing about the Wendel-Endsley group is the talent these six long time friends have individually. No one member stands out above the others and each player is afforded his chance to lead the audience through a musical journey in a style that crosses many musical genres and with a sound that’s identical to nobody else. Of course, members of Wendel-Endsley individually play with the likes of Ani Difranco, Macy Gray, Steve Coleman and Dakah, so the higher standard of musical talent applies. You can catch the very tight, absolutely amazing Wendel-Endsley Group most Monday nights at Temple Bar in Santa Monica as well as around the Los Angeles area.

by: A.C.

The Onion
April 10th, 2004
Kneebody, formerly the Wendel-Endlsey Group, is an innovative LA jazz band featuring three Denver-born musicians: Tumpeter Shane Endsley, drummer Scott Seiver, and bass player Kaveh Rastegar. Endsley has toured and recorded with Ani DiFranco, and Ani-ites may have noticed his horn-playing on DiFranco’s “So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter” and her new “Evolve”. Kneebody’s two other members met the Denver musicians while studying at New York’s Eastman School of Music. Seiver is the only member if Kneebody who didn’t attend Eastman. Instead, he honed his skills at Berklee College, and he boasts the most eclectic musical background, having recorded with P.J. Olsson, Tupak Shakur, and Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament’s side project, 3 Fish. Kneebody’s surprising music makes sense coming from a group of musicians whose resumes include stint with folk, funk, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and jam bands.

Tucson Weekly: City Week
March 2nd, 2004
BODY PARTS. You never know what you’ll get during the Zeitgeist Jazz at the Institute series. The music is often improvised, meandering around a theme or chord progression.

The five members of Kneebody all possess heavy-duty jazz educations–the Eastman/Cal Arts/Berklee crowd. They’re based in Los Angeles and they used to be called Wendel-Endsley Group. Despite their original lawyerish name, their sound is anything but buttoned up. They’re informed by their 20-something generation’s music: hip-hop, electronica, radical folk pop, jam bands, modern funk and alt rock.

When the cooperative quintet isn’t grooving together, they’re playing with the likes of Ani DiFranco, Macy Gray and the Dakah Hip-Hop Orchestra. Trumpeter Ralph Alessi says of Kneebody, “This is some of the freshest, most innovative, category-defying music that I’ve heard in a long time.”

The group includes Ben Wendel on sax, flute and pedals–he’s also just finished a score for a short film that went to Sundance. Shane Endsley plays trumpet and pedals, and is the creative force behind many of the bands compositions. Adam Benjamin Fender Rhodes (why not sport four names?) hits the pianos and keyboards. Kaveh Rastegar is the band’s prolific bassist, composer and visual artist. And Scott Seiver also composes for Kneebody and pounds on the drums and messes with samples.

Hear them altogether at 8 pm at the Mat Bevel Institute, 530 N. Stone Ave.