Kneebody: Reach
GroundUP

Some bands mellow with age. Not Kneebody: twenty-four years after its founding and six since its last studio album, the quartet sounds like a nascent outfit fresh from the gate and finding itself. That might have to do with a personnel change that came with the departure of bassist Kaveh Rastegar, who left to pursue other projects. The consequences of that are two-fold: as a quartet, Kneebody's leaner, and, with Nate Wood playing drums and electric bass simultaneously, the grooves are sharp, taut, and hard-hitting. In trumpeter Shane Endsley's words, “To say the band is just much more limber might be the best way to describe it.” Without overstating it, Reach feels like something of a rebirth.

The group's muscular hybrid of jazz, rock, hip-hop, and whatever else strikes its fancy is hard to pin down. Rather than constructing an album with pieces that veer into a different style one track at a time, Kneebody draws on all such elements within each one, the result a heady genre-crossing brew. There's soloing, for sure, from Endsley, saxophonist Ben Wendel, and keyboardist Adam Benjamin, but their statements are direct and concise, the result nine economical statements lasting from three to six minutes—no twenty-minute-long odysseys for this quartet. Call it jazz if you wish, but it's an outsider kind that eschews traditional swing and other signposts of the form.

Assembling the band into one space isn't easy when Wendel and Wood live in Brooklyn, Endsley Denver, and Benjamin Reno, and the last time they tried, around 2020, the pandemic deep-sixed their album plans. No such barrier was in place when the four convened at Brooklyn's Figure 8 Studios for five days in September 2023. Each brought newly hatched originals to the sessions, yet while the tracks are credited to individual members—four to Wendel, three Endsley, and two Benjamin—they were shaped and refined collectively into the performances on Reach.

A terrific choice of opener, Wendel's “Repeat After Me” is quintessential Kneebody in its thunderous bass-and-drum groove and the blazing front-line of Wendel and Endsley. With the two declaiming joyously over the rolling pulse, the music starts to sound like the kind of thing Miles was aiming for in the years after his 1980 return. Add in a hot-wired electric piano solo from Benjamin and you've got the perfect scene-setter. As much as the attention gravitates to the ensemble playing, the soloing's as strong, as illustrated by the blistering turn Endsley takes on the head-spinning “Reach” and the searing ones Benjamin and Wendel deliver during “Natural Bridge” and “Another One,” respectively. While Wood doesn't solo per se, the tight beats he fashions in explosive cuts such as “Top Hat” and “Repeat After Me” are arresting unto themselves. Endsley says “Natural Bridge” developed out of his interest in old-time American fiddle music, though you'd hardly know it from the future-funk throb the quartet gets up to in the track.

May 2025