Ben Wendel

Ben Wendel (born February 20, 1976 in Vancouver ) is a Canadian jazz musician ( saxophone , also bassoon and piano , composition ). He was best known as a founding member of the Grammy- nominated group Kneebody .

Live and act

Wendel grew up in Santa Monica in a creative, musical family; his mother is the opera singer and art administrator Dale Franzen. Wendel started playing the piano at the age of five. The saxophone was added when he was ten, and the bassoon as a teenager. After high school, he studied at the Eastman School of Music in New York.

During his studies he made friends with the trumpeter Shane Endsley , the keyboardist Adam Benjamin and the bassist Kaveh Rastegar. After graduating, they all moved to Los Angeles and formed the experimental ensemble Kneebody with drummer Nate Wood . As a member of Kneebody , Wendel earned recognition for albums such as Kneebody (2005) and Low Electrical Worker (2007), both of which were released on the Greenleaf Music label. In 2009 they received a Grammy nomination for the album Twelve Songs of Charles Ives, which the group released together with Theo Bleckmann .

Wendel has also worked with musicians such as Ignacio Berroa , Tigran Hamasyan , Antonio Sánchez , Eric Harland , Taylor Eigsti , Snoop Dogg , Prince and Todd Sickafoose , as well as with the electronic musician Daedelus . Together with Kent Nagano he realized concerts as part of the Munich Opera Festival in the Festspiel series .

Under his own name he released his debut album Simple Song in 2009 , followed by Frame in 2012. This was followed by the album Small Constructions (2013) as a duo with pianist Dan Tepfer . In the same year the album Line on Concord was created with Kneebody ; the album Kneedelus (with Daedelus) followed in 2015 . In 2016, Wendel released his third album under his own name, with pianist Gerald Clayton , bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Henry Cole . His video The Seasons (2015) and the album of the same name The Seasons (2018) contain various duos with musicians such as Taylor Eigsti, Julian Lage , Ambrose Akinmusire , Joshua Redman , Luciana Souza , Jeff Ballard and Mark Turner .

Wendel was initially an associate professor for jazz studies at USC ; he currently teaches at the New School in New York. As a composer, he was involved in the score for Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009) by John Krasinski .

Prizes and awards

As a composer, he received an ASCAP Jazz Composer Award and was awarded the Victor Lynch-Staunton Award by the Canada Council of the Arts . As a producer he was responsible for the Grammy nominated album Life Forum by Gerald Clayton for Concord Records .

Web links

• Web presence
• Ben Wendel at Allmusic (English)
• Ben Wendel at Discogs (English)