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Jens Wendelboe
The Persistence of Big Bands
by Geno Thackara
It's faintly amazing to be able to talk at all about big-band recordings--plural--emerging during an ongoing pandemic with no end in sight. Nonetheless it's a milieu that still enjoys plenty of devotion, and musicians (especially jazz players) are no strangers to realizing ideas that seem practically impossible. Here we have scores of them willing to keep the tradition alive, whatever the difficulties. Jens Wendelboe Against All Odds Losen Records 2021 You'll be disappointed ...
read moreJens Wendelboe's Big Crazy Energy New York Band: Inspirations, Vol. 1
by Jakob Baekgaard
Whenever Norwegian-born trombonist, composer, and arranger Jens Wendelboe starts working with his Big Crazy Energy New York Band, there's a rock-solid guarantee that it won't be boring. With uncompromising energy and an impeccable flair for picking tunes that will make his band swing like mad cats on the prowl, Wendelboe serves up his very own funkified version of contemporary big band jazz on Inspirations, Vol. 1. Billy Cobham's “Pleasant Pheasant" is an invitation to the dance floor ...
read moreJens Wendelboe: Crazy Energy Jazz Quartet / Get Crazy
by Jack Bowers
Norwegian trombonist Jens Wendelboe, who loves to “get crazy” by exploring various Jazz formats and sounds from swing to funk, Jazz–rock to fusion, motors straight down the middle of the road on the first of these two discs by his Crazy Energy Quartet, playing, for the most part, songs from the archives of popular and Jazz standards in a sinuously fluent manner that comes closest, perhaps, among his contemporaries to Carl Fontana (or a lower–voiced Bill Watrous, one of whose ...
read moreJens Wendelboe Big Crazy Energy Band: Volume 1 / Volume 2
by Jack Bowers
These releases by Norwegian trombonist Jens Wendelboe’s appropriately named Big Crazy Energy Band date from 1991–92, and they show again that while Wendelboe is an excellent Jazz composer/arranger, he is never one to take himself or the music too seriously, sprucing up his works with all manner of modern contrivances and conferring on them such highly descriptive names as “Fanfare and Punk (for the Monkey and the Monk).” There is some overlap, as Elisabeth Moberg sings “We Need Us All” ...
read moreJens Wendelboe Big Band / New York Big Band: Lone Attic / Letter from New York
by Jack Bowers
These discs could well be subtitled “Jens Wendelboe: The Early Years,” as both were recorded in the mid–’80s, the second as the (still relatively youthful) Norwegian–based trombonist/composer was completing work on a master’s degree in composition from the Manhattan School of Music. They may have been intended as LPs (the digital revolution was then in its embryonic stage) which would explain the relatively brief playing times (40:02, 48:36). Wendelboe’s compositions (he wrote and arranged everything on both discs) are good–humored ...
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