Sixteen
years in and the genre-bending electric jazz collective Kneebody is stronger
than ever. On the heels of their recent groundbreaking collaboration with
electronic musician Daedelus, the band returned to the studio refreshed and
armed with a slate of road-tested tunes for their ninth studio album. Kneebody
makes their Motéma Music debut on March 3 with the release of Anti-Hero, the
pulsating result of that creative rebirth, featuring an assured set of churning
backbeats and unrestrained exploration.
When
Kneebody first convened in the year 2001, they were five twenty-somethings
gigging around Los Angeles’ vast pockets of nightlife. Trumpeter Shane Endsley
and saxophonist Ben Wendel formed the frontline, telepathic and complimentary,
while keyboardist Adam Benjamin, bassist Kaveh Rastegar and drummer Nate Wood
formed the rhythm section.
These
five artists, all bandleaders in their own right, have become first-call
musicians not only for their jazz contemporaries, but also for mainstream icons
such as John Legend, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg and Pearl Jam to name a few. Yet
throughout the years, Kneebody has always remained their artistic home.
It
is the goal of the band to not be confined to any genre. Though they exist in
an instrumental jazz world, their influences and abilities cover an enormous
swath of genres from chamber pop to hard-driving electronic-based productions.
“I’ve
often joked that our band is almost infamous at this point for being extremely
hard to describe,” says Wendel. “I’ve always been proud of that. The music
we’re doing is always new but the band itself is not new. Kneebody has always
been our creative home. It’s always been the ground for us.”
The
band opens with the ethereal “For The Fallen” composed by Endsley. The
spiraling meditation is ominous. Endsley and Wendel weave in and out over
Benjamin’s humming keyboards, never getting too comfortable, while Wood
supplies a pounding backbeat for the self-titled track. Inspired by the
expanding outlets for protest and specifically the 2014 battle for net
neutrality, Endsley wrote the tune with a sense of empowerment. “There’s this
revolution in this age that can come from our living rooms. You can launch an
uprising from a coffee shop,” he marvels.
Wendel’s
“Drum Battle”, which originally appeared on the band’s 2015 Daedelus
collaboration Kneedelus, is a high-energy workout understandably powered by
Wood’s hard-rocking kit. Benjamin takes a soaring solo on the tune that
bends in and out of centuries, conjuring an electric squall squarely in the
here and now.
The
title track “Anti-Hero” is a more subdued but no less propulsive song composed
by Benjamin. “It’s one that we have been playing pretty regularly for the last
three or four years. It was a nice feeling to record a song that was already in
a fully mature phase.”
A
majority of the material on this record was honed on the road in the last few
years. The band takes pride in adhering to the spontaneity of never repeating a
take. Months of road-testing tunes results in a very focused mission for the
band but the studio as instrument has its charms too.
“When
it really works, to write collaboratively is the best thing ever,” says
Benjamin. “The five of us are totally equal in terms of our decision making on
a compositional level, performance level, even on a business level. When
everything is aligned and that works well, it is the best thing ever. We all
share in the process and feel responsible for the things that go well. That’s
what has kept it together for 16 years. We all feel like it’s our baby,
individually and collectively.”
Endsley’s
“The Balloonist” is one of those studio experiments. “It has kind of an
irreverent, brat-rock punky beat. It’s above the earth. There is a heaviness
but it also has a bouncy lightness to it.” Benjamin’s humming keyboards help
that process with Rastegar and Wood in choppy synchronicity on the brisk
rocker.
Two
of Rastegar’s contributions are tributes to musicians gone far too soon. “For
Mikie Lee” is a tribute to Bay Area musician Mikie Lee Prasad, a triumphant
mid-tempo tune that moves with grungy deliberation. Both Wendel and Endsley
heighten the performance with soaring confessions amid the pounding rhythm
section.
“Austin
Peralta” is the album closer. “Austin was a phenomenon,” remembers Rastegar.
“He was at a high school that we would go to to teach some workshops and
clinics. I remember him as an 11th grader, confident, shaggy-headed precocious
wunderkind. Pretty soon after high school he started hiring some of us to play
his gigs.” Upon the pianist’s unexpected passing at the age of 22, Rastegar
wrote the tune as a solo bass meditation. In the studio he opened it up to the
rest of the band. ”We put two drum kits on it. It’s got a stately mournful
sound but it’s also got so much wandering beauty, people floating in and out.”
“Profar,”
Benjamin’s nod to West Indies baseball player Jurickson Profar, grooves with
life. “It’s a dense, through-composed piece that’s almost like an etude or a
chamber music piece,” says Benjamin. “Usually in our set list and our live
shows, we like to have a balance of music that is dense versus music that is
very open. We like to improvise with structures in a jazz tradition.” Both
horns shine with bright solos that ride over Wood’s sly tambourine and a plucky
chicken scratch groove.
The
spacious “Carry On” is one of Wendel’s contributions, a tricky bout that
summons the heavens. “I have always felt that Kneebody is more in the spirit of
a singer-songwriter, rock band where songs are honed in a certain way. My
criteria tends to be that the song has a real strong composed element to it. If
there are solos, it’s going to be really specific and maybe kind of minimal.
I’ll think specifically of a band member that would be perfect for. They aren’t
open jazz vehicles where I could bring it to anybody and ten million people can
solo on it. There’s a certain kind of conciseness that I think is the same sort
of producer version that someone would bring to a singer’s album.”
“Yes
You” is a frenetic feature for Wendel, highlighting his deft chops and endless
string of ideas and motion. The live element pervades with the sound of a band
deep into a conversation that only they can control. They flutter like a flock
of birds, plugged in and unafraid of hard turns on sharp corners.
“It
feels to me like the best representation of what the band sounds like live in
terms of a focused effort,” confides Wood about Anti-Hero. “That keeps it not
too wandering for repeated listening but it has the energy of a live show. It
was an easy album to make. We can just kind of do our thing and it seems to
work pretty well.”
