KNEEBODY - Chapters
Edition: EDN1137
Ben Wendel: saxophone, effects; Shane Endsley: trumpet, effects; Adam Benjamin: keyboards; Nate Wood: drums, bass; Kaveh Rastegar: bass; Gerald Clayton: piano; Josh Dion: vocals, synth bass, drums; Michael Mayo: vocals (track2); Becca Stevens: vocals (track4); Gretchen Parlato: vocals (track 9)
Recorded April 2019 (1,7,9) by Lily Wen at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn; February 2018 (3, 5, 8, 10) by Nate Wood in Benaji Studios, Laguna Beach, California; April 2018 (2, 4, 6) by Sam Owens at Figure 8 Recording.
With Kaveh Rastegar working on his recent solo album, this is the first Kneebody outing without one of their founder members on all of the tracks. Interestingly, Nate Wood steps up to the task by performing on bass and drums. This is a mixture of genres with a collection of musicians around a core membership of a Kneebody quintet. The opening (‘Spectra’) and closing (‘The non-profit prince of lexington’) feature a choir of wordless singing that follows the sax and trumpet lines. These bookends to the set feature the bass playing of Wood on the opening track and Rastegar on the closing track, and there is a sense in which this creates a feeling of continuity of the broad approach of the band (albeit with the first track recorded months after the last one). In between these, the set broadly splits into instrumentals, which capture the shuffled, disjointed beats that Kneebody have been pursuing over their previous 9 albums, with a strong presence of the twin sax and trumpet front line, and songs with guest vocalists.
The songs have a feeling on musical theatre, particularly track 2 ‘What’s my name?’ which has a strong sense of providing the exposition for a play, or adult-oriented rock. This creates an interesting dynamic in the shifts in style, genre, mood from piece to piece. For a jazz review site, the instrumental pieces have the strongest heft and track 3, ‘A seaworthy native’ and the title track (track 5) are particularly strong, with inventive chord developments, rhythms and solos. In these tracks, you have the combined experience and talent of a band some 15 years in the making. The songs illustrate their desire to explore new directions, and the guest vocalists provide contrasting styles of singing to which the band respond with panache. The titles of the tracks (and the lyrics of the songs) suggest some deeper turmoil but the playing creates a mixture of hesitancy and jubilation that seems an appropriate response to the ups and downs of our contemporary world.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
Edition: EDN1137
Ben Wendel: saxophone, effects; Shane Endsley: trumpet, effects; Adam Benjamin: keyboards; Nate Wood: drums, bass; Kaveh Rastegar: bass; Gerald Clayton: piano; Josh Dion: vocals, synth bass, drums; Michael Mayo: vocals (track2); Becca Stevens: vocals (track4); Gretchen Parlato: vocals (track 9)
Recorded April 2019 (1,7,9) by Lily Wen at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn; February 2018 (3, 5, 8, 10) by Nate Wood in Benaji Studios, Laguna Beach, California; April 2018 (2, 4, 6) by Sam Owens at Figure 8 Recording.
With Kaveh Rastegar working on his recent solo album, this is the first Kneebody outing without one of their founder members on all of the tracks. Interestingly, Nate Wood steps up to the task by performing on bass and drums. This is a mixture of genres with a collection of musicians around a core membership of a Kneebody quintet. The opening (‘Spectra’) and closing (‘The non-profit prince of lexington’) feature a choir of wordless singing that follows the sax and trumpet lines. These bookends to the set feature the bass playing of Wood on the opening track and Rastegar on the closing track, and there is a sense in which this creates a feeling of continuity of the broad approach of the band (albeit with the first track recorded months after the last one). In between these, the set broadly splits into instrumentals, which capture the shuffled, disjointed beats that Kneebody have been pursuing over their previous 9 albums, with a strong presence of the twin sax and trumpet front line, and songs with guest vocalists.
The songs have a feeling on musical theatre, particularly track 2 ‘What’s my name?’ which has a strong sense of providing the exposition for a play, or adult-oriented rock. This creates an interesting dynamic in the shifts in style, genre, mood from piece to piece. For a jazz review site, the instrumental pieces have the strongest heft and track 3, ‘A seaworthy native’ and the title track (track 5) are particularly strong, with inventive chord developments, rhythms and solos. In these tracks, you have the combined experience and talent of a band some 15 years in the making. The songs illustrate their desire to explore new directions, and the guest vocalists provide contrasting styles of singing to which the band respond with panache. The titles of the tracks (and the lyrics of the songs) suggest some deeper turmoil but the playing creates a mixture of hesitancy and jubilation that seems an appropriate response to the ups and downs of our contemporary world.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
