When faced with the prospect of replacing an irreplaceable member of the band, Kneebody found a singular solution to the conundrum.
Over the past two decades the Grammy-nominated group established its own musical niche with a protean chamber improv aesthetic defined by crackling indie rock energy, funky electronica and subtle but conspicuous production concepts inspired by 1990s hip-hop, all filtered through masterly jazz chops.
That volatile mix threatened to come undone when Kneebody’s founding bassist, Kaveh Rastegar, finally decided to light out on his own as a singer/songwriter after a prolific parallel career as a studio musician, producer, and composer. Rather than finding another player to fill out the quintet, keyboardist Adam Benjamin, trumpeter Shane Endsley and saxophonist Ben Wendel turned to bandmate Nate Wood, who became Kneebody’s double-jointed rhythm section.
As the group’s drummer and erstwhile bassist when Rastegar was unavailable, Wood came into permanent possession of the second chair. Released last month on GroundUP, “Reach,” the band’s first new studio album since 2019, marks Kneebody’s relaunch as a quartet with a sleeker, more muscular sound.
Wood doubling on bass “was our default mode if Kaveh couldn’t be there, but we never started writing new tunes from scratch as a quartet,” said Endsley on a recent video call with Wendel. “When we’re writing now we’re definitely creating material that’s less dense and less intricate, thinking about not overloading someone playing two instruments.”
“The way the band has worked, we’d tour regularly, work out material and then record,” Wendel added. “That system got disrupted and put on pause for at least three years. Coming back together as a quartet we all felt we can still do this, and it’s been really fun to work it out with Nate.”
Kneebody reintroduces itself to the region with a series of gigs next week, starting Wednesday, May 21 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center. On Thursday May 22 the band plays the SFJAZZ Center with pianist/keyboardist Aaron Parks’ Little Big quartet.
The double bill is the concluding concert in the inaugural season of SFJAZZ Executive Artistic Director Terence Blanchard’s UpSwing, a series that the trumpeter introduced to showcase artists he feels should be better known. Kneebody’s Bay Area run concludes Friday, May 23 with two shows at San Jose Jazz’s Break Room.
Unleashing Wood has ushered in an exciting new phase for a widely influential band that has defined a state-of-the-art jazz idiom deeply engaged with other genres. He’s spent years developing his skills playing tandem bass and drums in his solo project fOUR, which he’s documented with a video series capturing his real-time creation of one-take performances with no prerecorded backing tracks or overdubs.
“He can create this amazing, transportive world,” Endsley said. “We’re just at the beginning of incorporating that new ability.”
The fact that Rastegar anchored Kneebody for so long speaks to the band’s potent creative gravitational force, as the centrifugal pull of his other pursuits was powerful. Deeply enmeshed in the Los Angeles studio scene, he’s written songs with hitmakers such as Bruno Mars, De La Soul, Ciara, CeeLo Green, and Meshell Ndegeocello, while touring and recording widely with John Legend (including an on-screen appearance with the singer/songwriter in the 2016 musical “La La Land”).
Born in Los Angeles at the turn of the century when Benjamin met Wood at Cal Arts after transferring from the Eastman School of Music (where the keyboardist met the other three founders), the group corralled and integrated a diverse array of influences and references.
The instrumentation seemed to connect Kneebody to the Southern California jazz/rock fusion legacy of bands like the Yellowjackets, “but our references are different. The music we fell in love with is a bit later, hip hop, EDM, Nirvana, Radiohead, that’s more the stuff that was feeding into the sound,” said Wendel, a prolific, Grammy-nominated bandleader and sideman who’s featured with pianist Taylor Eigsti’s quartet July 31 at the Stanford Jazz Festival.
What makes Kneebody such a fascinating combo isn’t the particular ingredients so much as they way the players have combined them, “the random alchemy that comes together with five, now four, people,” Wendel said.
“I was raised by an opera singing mom, fully immersed in the classical world. I didn’t know anything about punk rock, and here comes Kaveh, who grew up on punk. Every person brought their imprint. We were all curious about each other’s influences, and were figuring out ways to put that in one pot.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].
KNEEBODY
When & where: 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. May 23 at San Jose Jazz Break Room, San Jose; $35; sanjosejazz.org.