Another reminder that Wendel remains one of jazz’s most unpredictable architects.
Edition Records
Ben Wendel – tenor saxophone, effects; Joel Ross – vibraphone, marimba; Simon Moullier – vibraphone, chromatic balafon, effects; Patricia Brennan – vibraphone, effects; Juan Diego Villalobos – vibraphone, mallet station (midi controller), percussion, effects
Jazz has never been short of unusual instrumental combinations, but four vibraphones and one saxophone is a genuinely strange bet. “This is just me continuing to be me,” Ben Wendel said. “I just can’t seem to do normal projects.” Wendel assembled BaRcoDe around Joel Ross, Simon Moullier, Patricia Brennan, and Juan Diego Villalobos — four of the most inventive voices in contemporary percussion — developing the group’s sound across two residencies at The Jazz Gallery before recording at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn in early 2025. Rooted in his long love of chamber music and contemporary composition, the record lands as one of the more quietly radical things he’s made.
“Clouds” opens with two vibraphonists splitting a single melody between them in rapid alternation, a technique called hocketing that gives the music a shimmering, interlocking pulse. Wendel’s saxophone weaves over the top, and what registers immediately is texture: this is not a record that leads with swing, but with melody shaped into atmosphere and architecture.
Shifting and destabilizing, “Mimo” — named for the Czech word meaning “outside” — lets polyrhythms accumulate around a ticking, clock-like center until the whole thing goes beautifully free. The same fate befalls “Repeat After Me,” which Wendel has recorded before in a far louder setting; stripped down to marimba and vibraphone, its Morse code repetitions take on an almost meditative precision.
The centerpiece is the Jobim cover. Wendel calls “Olha Maria” one of his favorite compositions ever, and he treats it accordingly — slow-motion and ethereal, with a gentle rocking sensation that makes the whole thing feel like it’s floating. His tenor stays in its lower register for long stretches, mournful and unhurried, while the vibes solo and resonate around him, at times mimicking the saxophone’s own phrases. Harmonically it stays close to the original; emotionally it becomes something else entirely.
“Birds Ascend” is mostly through-composed, mallet instruments climbing into the upper registers in fast, interlocking lines that do actually conjure a flock in flight. The closing “Lonely One” reveals something unexpected — Wendel is a whistler, and here the whistle isn’t carefree but something closer to what you’d hear in an old film noir, late-night and unsettling, drifting between electronics and saxophone in a piece he describes as his “happy/sad place.” It lands.
Four vibraphones and a saxophone raise an obvious question: why? BaRcoDe doesn’t answer it so much as make you stop asking — the music is too absorbing to worry about the logic behind the lineup. Another reminder that Wendel remains one of jazz’s most unpredictable architects.
