Kneebody
Kneebody Bio
In their more than two-decade history, the Grammy nominated band Kneebody has created a genre and style all its own. Their sound is explosive rock energy and high-level nuanced chamber ensemble playing set within the frames of highly wrought compositions that are balanced with adventurous no-holds-barred improvising. Kneebody is keyboardist Adam Benjamin, trumpeter Shane Endsley, saxophonist Ben Wendel and drummer/bassist Nate Wood. The band has no leader or rather, each member is the leader; they’ve developed their own musical language, inventing a unique cueing system that allows them each to change the tempo, key, style, and more in an instant.
The group met in their late teens while at The Eastman School of Music and Cal Arts, became fast friends, and converged together as Kneebody amid the vibrant and eclectic music scene of Los Angeles in 2001. Since then, each band member has amassed an impressive list of credits and accomplishments over the years all while the band has continued to thrive and grow in reputation, solidifying a fan base around the world. (full bio available at kneebody.com)
Music
Reach (2025)
This album was several years in the making and is a truly celebratory moment for Kneebody and their devoted audience. The band is extremely proud of this new collection of material and is beyond thrilled to be reuniting as a musical family to tour this music in 2025.
Kneebody was in the middle of an album touring cycle when the pandemic shut down the whole world. The initial plans to reunite for the next album were held up from multiple angles, including the complication of band members residing in disparate locations around the globe. The collective desire to continue building on nearly 30 years of creativity and camaraderie was strong, and in September of 2023, the group reconvened at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn. Trumpeter Shane Endsley says, “We were on this imposed break and were contemplating what our next album could be. There were conversations about, and with, potential producers and collaborators that could steer us in a new direction, but the plans weren’t coming to fruition in the time frame we set out for ourselves. Instead, we decided to come together and make something new on our own, the way we always have. We knew we wanted to work from less intricate seed material. Our work together has always been grounded in an appetite for technical challenges and we wanted to try and soften that edge of our process for this recording. Ben, Adam and I brought in a number of compositions and we spent five days finding our way on those, plus lots of open improvising.”
The result is a new album that coalesces the unmistakable sound Kneebody has cultivated over two decades with glimmers of the new directions this veteran collective is ready to venture towards. It is the first Kneebody album to be completely set in the “new” quartet format that features the incomparable talents of Nate Wood playing bass and drums simultaneously.
