Ben Wendel was born February 20, 1976, in Vancouver, Canada, and raised in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he later taught Jazz Studies at USC and the New School in New York City, and now lives in Brooklyn. Known for harmonically sophisticated, motivic improvisation and a compositional style spanning post-bop, classical, and post-rock influences, Wendel is a founding member of the Grammy-nominated group Kneebody.

As a composer he received an ASCAP Jazz Composer Award, Chamber Music America "New Works Grants" in 2008, 2011, and 2017, and the Victor Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts. He debuted as a leader in 2009 with Simple Song, followed by Frame (2012) and What We Bring (2016) with pianist Gerald Clayton. He drew on Tchaikovsky for 2018's The Seasons, continued pushing stylistic boundaries with 2020's High Heart and 2023's All One, released Understory: Live at the Village Vanguard in 2024 with a new quartet, and delivered the studio album BaRcoDe in 2026.

Wendel has toured, performed, or recorded with Tigran Hamasyan, Bill Frisell, Terence Blanchard, Antonio Sanchez, Gerald Clayton, Taylor Eigsti, Linda May Han Oh, and bassist Hamish Smith, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, as well as more pop-adjacent figures including Snoop Dogg and Prince.

Wendel's sustained project-based career, moving between Kneebody's post-rock-informed fusion, his own harmonically dense leader records, and even a full album drawing on Tchaikovsky, established him as one of the most compositionally ambitious saxophonists of his generation.