Photo by Dave Stapleton
Ben Wendel -saxophone, EFX
Joel Ross -vibraphone, marimba, percussion
Simon Moullier -vibraphone, chromatic balafon, EFX
Patricia Brennan -vibraphone, marimba, EFX
Juan Diego Villalobos -vibraphone, electric marimba, percussion, EFX
Grammy nominated saxophonist Ben Wendel was born in Vancouver, Canada and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Currently living in Brooklyn, NY, he has enjoyed a varied career as a performer, composer and producer. Highlights include tours, performances and/or recordings with artists such as Tigran Hamasyan, Bill Frisell, Terence Blanchard, Antonio Sanchez, Gerald Clayton, Taylor Eigsti, Linda May Han Oh, Moonchild, Louis Cole, Daedelus, Snoop Dogg and the artist formerly known as Prince. Ben is a founding member of the Grammy nominated group Kneebody.
As a composer, he has received an ASCAP Jazz Composer Award, the 2008, 2011 and 2017 Chamber Music America “New Works Grant” and was awarded the Victor Lynch-Staunton award by the Canada Council for the Arts. He has also co-written multiple scores for film, television and animated shorts.
Ben has recorded for Edition Records, Sunnyside Records, Motéma Music, Concord Records and Brainfeeder, including six solo albums, Simple Song (2009), Frame (2012), What We Bring (2016) The Seasons (2018), High Heart (2020), All One (2023) and multiple Kneebody albums. His critically acclaimed music video project The Seasons, inspired by Tchaikovsky’s works of the same name, was released throughout 2015 and included guests such as Joshua Redman, Jeff Ballard, Mark Turner, Julian Lage, Ambrose Akinmusire and more. It was listed as one of the best albums of 2015 by the NY Times.
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Ben is a former teacher of Jazz Studies at USC and the New School in NYC. Educational outreach has been a constant in his career with over 300 masterclasses at various colleges and universities around the world. His online masterclass series and other educational products have been sold in over sixty countries.
TJG FELLOWSHIP COMMISSION
The Jazz Gallery has long supported the youngest generation of jazz musicians through various programming initiatives and now seeks to address the relative scarcity of resources dedicated to established artists and advanced professionals, who often balance the professional demands of performing, touring, and teaching with additional obligations related to their families (e.g., parenting), which are less likely to affect younger or older artists.In our years of nurturing young, emerging artists, it has come to our attention that established artists and advanced professionals often struggle to sustain the momentum of their creative output and career trajectory.
The Jazz Gallery Fellowship comprises of a cash award as well as a two-week residency at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Fellows also have access to The Jazz Gallery space during its off-hours for 12-month period. The Fellowship aims to provide the financial support and logistical freedom to its recipients to focus their energy for a brief but substantial period on new compositional projects. The Jazz Gallery will present formal premieres of completed works. We believe that this opportunity will enable the fellowship recipients to develop potentially career-transforming new works that would otherwise not be possible.
With the Fellowship program, we hope to strengthen our holistic approach to supporting artists and the art form. Many grant programs, competitions, contests, and journalistic awards explicitly feature "emerging" improvisers and composers, while high-visibility cultural awards are generally reserved for much older figures in jazz. The Jazz Gallery hopes to address a gap in allocating funds and resources for established artists and advanced professionals, who, unfortunately, are sometimes taken for granted by the jazz audience and press. Although this program would be a small step toward redressing the relative lack of opportunities for those who fit neither the profiles of rising star nor jazz legend, as favored in the jazz business, the Gallery hopes that such a program will draw attention to this deficiency, setting a precedent to inspire other organizations to devote greater resources for established artists and advanced professionals.