JENS WENDELBOE ::: Crazy Energy Productions

Big Crazy Energy Band

The Big Crazy Energy Band plays on 5 of Wendelboe's CD's featuring award winning compositions and the top musicians in New York and Europe. The band plays all original compositions by Jens Wendelboe. Among other venues, the Big Crazy Energy Band played regularly at 7th Avenue South in 1985 during Wendelboe's 1 year stay in New York, and has also opened the world famous Molde Jazz Festival in Wendelboe's home country of Norway in 1992. The band played regularly at Serafina's in NYC in 2001 and was featured at the 2004 International Arts & Ideas Festival in New Haven. The band has been critiqued with raving revues wherever it performs due to the combination of exciting lyrical compositions, top level solos and musicianship, as well as showmanship.

Some quotes about Jen's Big Band music:

" While he's not well known in the United States, Wendelboe shows clearly on these exemplary recording that even by the mid '80's he had earned a place near the head of the class among contemporary big band composers and arrangers."

"Wendelboe is an excellent writer whose compositions whatever their character or tempo, are consistently lyrical and swinging."

"For the opened minded listener, a savory banquet of enterprising big-band jazz."

" It's hard to describe Wendelboe's compositional approach except to say that it is closer to Henry Threadgill, Lester Bowie, or Maria Schneider than to Basie or Ellington."
From Jack Bowers, All About Jazz

"I've been most impressed by his unique style of arranging sounds on paper. It's so fresh and cheeky, rough and brassy, full of the same exuberance that characterizes his whole personality. . Jens exudes ENERGY on all levels. His entire personality seems to be molded around an ever vibrant core of pure action. Whether he writes a jazzy big band piece or an orchestral composition in a contemporary "serious vein" he discloses qualities that belong to a very special composer of music."
From Bjorn Kruse, The Royal State Academy of Music, Norway

Some quotes about Jen's trombone music:

"With a resume as fat as that of Jens (pronounced Yens) Wendelboe, you might think he should be a household name. And you'd be right, of course, except that the accomplished Wendelboe, who now lives in the United States, had the misfortune (at least from a worldwide jazz perspective) to make his mark in relatively tiny and isolated Oslo, Norway. But hearing the talented trombonist on one of his many recordings might be a wakeup call that some of the best jazz trombonists are not American, though their influences might be. "
From Steve Loewy, in a soon to be published book entitled "World Famous Trombone Players.

To book the Big Crazy Energy Band or for more information please contact:
jens.wendelboe@crazyenergy.com