Kneebody – Reach (GroundUP, 2025)
Six years off the radar, Kneebody returns not with a whisper but with Reach, an electrified statement that doubles as a legacy flex and a leap into uncharted musical terrain. The genre-busting outfit, now pared down to a razor-sharp quartet, uses this studio comeback to rewire its circuitry without losing its deep improvisational current.
Gone is bassist Kaveh Rastegar. In his place, drummer Nate Wood pulls double duty, laying down both groove and pulse simultaneously, live and in real time. With Ben Wendel on sax, Shane Endsley on trumpet, and Adam Benjamin’s keyboard sleight-of-hand, this iteration of Kneebody mutates, morphs, and swings in its own time signature.
Recorded over five relaxed days at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios, Reach breathes, eschewing the usual jazz treadmill for something more elastic. It’s a reset, yes, but also a reaffirmation: of cue-based interplay so tight it functions like telepathy, of grooves that refuse to sit still, of tunes that stretch from electro-soul to Appalachian fiddle, from vaporwave lilt to post-bop heat.
Every cut is a launchpad. Wendel’s “Repeat After Me” taps out Morse-code motifs over shifting harmonic ground. “Natural Bridge” draws from old-time fiddle traditions, twisted into modern counterpoint. Benjamin’s “Glimmer,” played on the Una Corda piano, reads like a memory dressed as a melody. “Top Hat” evokes speakeasy swagger, while “Lo Hi” hints at the ghost of a Tune-Yards collab. These are composite organisms, built to evolve onstage.
What holds it all together is Kneebody’s patented sign-language of the bandstand, an invisible mesh of cues and nods that allows for set lists made in real time, jam sections born mid-flight, and radical reharmonizations on the spot.
Yet for all its edge, Reach beams with familiarity. It’s the sound of a band that’s lived together in rhythm, drifted apart, and reconvened not out of obligation, but because the music still asks something of them.
“This band is our laboratory,” says Wendel. “It’s where we experiment, where we fail, where we land on things no one else could make.”
Musicians: Ben Wendel on saxophone; Shane Endsley on trumpet; Adam Benjamin on keyboards; and Nate Wood on drums and bass.
Buy Reach.