Kneebody returns with Reach, their first studio album in six years, showcasing their singular musical vision with a reinvented lineup, set for release on April 18, 2025, via GroundUP Music.

Reach (releasing April 18, 2025, GroundUP) the first new studio album Kneebody has released since 2019, acts as both a rebirth for the genre-blurring quartet and a continuation of the concepts it has evolved over the past 24 years. 

It is also an opportunity for the band and its fans to reflect on the impact that Kneebody has had on the current musical landscape, where electric, eclectic improvised music fits comfortably on tastemaking playlists alongside indie rock, hip-hop and electronic music. “We’re not the young kids on the block anymore,” says saxophonist Ben Wendel. “I’ve been looking back and appreciating the sound that we made, and realizing that it really had an effect on our scene. It’s a legacy moment, if you will.”  

Reach, which was produced by the band, is also the first Kneebody studio release to feature solely the ingenious lineup of Wendel on saxophone, Shane Endsley on trumpet, Adam Benjamin on keyboards and Nate Wood playing — simultaneously and remarkably — drums and electric bass. The format follows the departure of bassist Kaveh Rastegar, who left to pursue other projects, and it allowed Wood to “change how I conceive of Kneebody, which was something I wanted to do anyway,” he says. “I have to simplify and streamline what I’m doing, and have it be more focused. And I enjoy it, because I’ve never really heard jazz music like this before.” 

“To say the band is just much more limber might be the best way to describe it,” adds Endsley. “There’s a lightness to it that I don’t think we’ve experienced before.”

This new music coalesced over five days of recording at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios — a generous chunk of studio time that felt in many ways like a homecoming. Away from the familiar rushed jazz production schedule, Endsley explains, “we had the luxury to pace ourselves and feel fresher when we were playing.” The members of Kneebody are the kind of restless, curious musicians who always seem to have a dozen projects in play at once, so the last time they converged was in the winter of 2020, when the pandemic promptly shut down an album cycle.

In typical Kneebody fashion, the members brought new original music to the sessions, but this time out, they did more writing and collaborating in the studio, to home in on refining the newer quartet chemistry while keeping the tunes lean, mean and open. “Going into the studio, there was a little bit of a feeling of how does this work? Like, can we still do this? There was discovery in it,” says Wendel.

“Getting a break from the band and then coming back,” he continues, “gave us a chance to reinvent the sound and keep pushing forward. Which has always been the point of this band: It’s our vehicle to experiment and try new things. And I’m really proud of where these tunes went.” 

The result is a compelling set of grooves and melodies that act as ideal vehicles for improvisation — and provide perfect material for Kneebody to navigate using their finely wrought onstage cueing system. That system — which is so intricate and seamlessly delivered that concertgoers are none the wiser — allows Kneebody to reinvent arrangements, extend jams and improvise a setlist on the fly. Endsley describes it as “a bunch of really quick signals, akin to a third-base coach in baseball,” and says it includes both minute physical gestures and short musical phrases. To be sure, the nine tunes on Reach will hit the stratosphere on live dates to come.

As fresh and adventurous as this music is, it will also delight longtime Kneebody fans. Per usual, the music is so stylistically wide-ranging, yet so unique and identifiable in its signature, that parsing its different genre components is futile — state-of-the-art jazz disappears into rock, electronica and 21st-century R&B, with new-music and contemporary classical concepts, roots, world music and more in the blender.

This music can be difficult to describe, but the members of Kneebody gave it a shot anyway. Wendel’s sample-worthy “Repeat After Me” is, per the composer, “me trying to channel a Morse-code-type melody through groove and shifting harmony.” On “Another One,” he accesses  Wood’s groove-machine brilliance and floats a sprightly, savvy theme over the top. “Natural Bridge,” says Endsley, grew out of his “interest in traditional American fiddle music — in particular old-time music.” 

For “Top Hat,” Endsley tapped into jazz-age revelry; “Lo Hi” emerged from a planned, but later abandoned, collaboration with Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus. Benjamin’s “Glimmer” is unforgettable like a great nostalgic pop single, with a gorgeously wistful melody and the surprising texture of a one-string-per-note Una Corda piano. The keyboardist calls “Long Walk,” which began its life as a solo-piano piece and was expanded in the studio, “a sort of country-western power-ballad tone poem.”  

Today, nearly a quarter-century after the band’s founding in Los Angeles, the members of Kneebody remain committed to the group and to each other — despite their involvement in numerous other projects and the challenges of sheer geography. (While Wendel and Wood live in Brooklyn, Endsley is based in Denver and Benjamin works as an educator in Reno.)

“Kneebody is the foundation of my identity,” says Wood. “I’ve been playing with these guys since I was 19 years old and in college. So for me there’s Kneebody and everything else.”

“You only get one chance to have old friends,” adds Wendel. “I’ve always wanted to be part of a band that develops both on a personal level and a musical level over a long period of time. That’s a safe place to create and share and experience things. It’s like a port that’s always there for my ship.”

TRACKLIST

1. Repeat After Me 3:55
2. Reach 3:50
3. Natural Bridge 4:37
4. Glimmer 3:16
5. Another One 4:36
6. Top Hat 5:10
7. Lo Hi 6:13
8. Long Walk 2:45
9. Say So 4:08
10. For DF 3:40

Ben Wendel – Saxophone
Shane Endsley – Trumpet
Adam Benjamin – Keyboards
Nate Wood – Drums & Bass

from https://lydialiebman.com