Ben Wendel was born February 20, 1976, in Vancouver, Canada, into a musically inclined family, and grew up in Los Angeles. He started on piano at five and picked up saxophone around age ten, developing into a player equally comfortable on tenor sax, bassoon, and piano — an unusual instrumental spread that would come to define his compositional voice. After high school he headed east to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where he fell in with a cohort of fellow students — trumpeter Shane Endsley, keyboardist Adam Benjamin, and bassist Kaveh Rastegar — whose friendships would reshape the next two decades of his career.

Back in Los Angeles in 2001, Wendel, Endsley, and Benjamin formed Kneebody with drummer Nate Wood (who also plays bass guitar, sometimes simultaneously), building a band deliberately resistant to genre labels — post-bop technique wired into electro-pop, punk, and hip-hop textures. Kneebody's self-titled debut appeared in 2005 on trumpeter Dave Douglas's Greenleaf Music, followed by Low Electrical Worker (2007) and Twelve Songs by Charles Ives (2008, Winter & Winter), a reimagining of Ives songs with vocalist Theo Bleckmann that earned the band its first Grammy nomination, for Best Classical Crossover Album, in 2010. The band kept moving: You Can Have Your Moment (2010), The Line (2013, Concord), Kneedelus (2015/16, Brainfeeder) — a full collaborative record with electronic producer Daedelus — Anti-Hero (2017, Motéma), and Chapters (2019, Edition Records), the group's first album as a settled quartet, with guest vocalists including Becca Stevens, Gretchen Parlato, and Michael Mayo. After a six-year gap, Kneebody returned in April 2025 with Reach on GroundUP Music, recorded at Brooklyn's Figure 8 Studios in a stripped-down quartet format built around Wood playing bass and drums at once.

Alongside Kneebody, Wendel built a substantial run as a leader in his own right. He debuted with Simple Song (Sunnyside, 2009), recorded in 2007 at Castle Oaks Studio in Los Angeles with guests including pianists Tigran Hamasyan and Taylor Eigsti, followed by Frame (Sunnyside, 2012). In 2011 he recorded a duo album with pianist Dan Tepfer, Small Constructions, released by Sunnyside in March 2013 (a later Discogs-catalogued CD pressing carries a 2017 date, but the original release predates it by four years). What We Bring (Motéma, 2016) paired him with pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Joe Sanders, and drummer Henry Cole — the same year he produced Clayton's own Life Forum (2013) as a separate credit.

Wendel's most distinctive project began as something other than an album: The Seasons, a 2015 video series pairing him in a different duet every month of the year with guests including Joshua Redman, Julian Lage, Mark Turner, Jeff Ballard, and Ambrose Akinmusire, loosely inspired by Tchaikovsky's piano cycle of the same name. The New York Times named it one of the best releases of 2015 before Wendel re-recorded the material as a studio album, released by Motéma in 2018. He followed with High Heart (Edition Records, 2020), featuring Gerald Clayton, Shai Maestro, and vocalist Michael Mayo, and All One (Edition Records, 2023) — made substantially during COVID-19 lockdown and built around layered sax-and-bassoon textures, with guests Bill Frisell, Terence Blanchard, Tigran Hamasyan, Cécile McLorin Salvant, José James, and Elena Pinderhughes. All One earned Wendel his second Grammy nomination, for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, at the 2024 ceremony. Understory: Live at the Village Vanguard, recorded November 4–6, 2022, with Linda May Han Oh on bass and vocals, Gerald Clayton on piano, and Obed Calvaire on drums, followed on Edition in 2024. His most recent studio album, BaRcoDe (Edition Records, March 2026), reorients his working format around a vibraphone-heavy ensemble of Joel Ross, Simon Moullier, Patricia Brennan, and Juan Diego Villalobos.

As a composer, Wendel holds an ASCAP Jazz Composer Award, three Chamber Music America "New Works" grants (2008, 2011, 2017), and the Victor Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts. He taught jazz studies at USC and the New School, directed the Broad Stage's Jazz and Blues initiative in Santa Monica from 2008 to 2015 (working alongside figures including Quincy Jones and Herb Alpert), and by his own account has since given more than 300 masterclasses internationally. He now lives in Brooklyn.

Wendel's sideman and production work runs in parallel to his leader catalog and stretches well outside straight-ahead jazz: he has recorded or toured with Tigran Hamasyan, Bill Frisell, Terence Blanchard, Antonio Sanchez, Taylor Eigsti, bassist Linda May Han Oh (whose 2013 quartet album Sun Pictures, on Greenleaf, he plays on), and — at the pop end — Snoop Dogg and, per his own official biography, Prince. More recently he has moved into production: he produced and plays saxophone on guitarist Rotem Sivan's Heart Thieves (2025) and produced Sivan's Dream Louder (2024), both self-released and both featuring bassist Hamish Smith — whose own JazzProfiles.com profile documents the same two dated studio credits from the other side of the collaboration. Bassist Ben Tiberio, per his own artist bio, has also worked as a sideman in Wendel's more exploratory postbop settings, alongside stints with Ari Hoenig, Shai Maestro, and Aaron Goldberg; Tiberio is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com.

Wendel's music sits at the intersection of two instincts that don't often share a bandleader: Kneebody's genre-blurring, backbeat-driven fusion, built collectively with three of his oldest musical friends, and a harmonically dense, compositionally ambitious leader catalog that draws as freely on classical form (the Tchaikovsky-inspired The Seasons, the Ives arrangements with Kneebody) as on post-bop vocabulary. His doubling on bassoon — rare in jazz saxophone circles — gives his writing a darker, reedier low register that shows up throughout All One and BaRcoDe, both built around layered wind and mallet-percussion textures rather than a conventional rhythm section. Across three decades he has moved fluidly between deeply notated long-form projects and looser sideman and production work, a range reflected in two Grammy nominations in two different categories — classical crossover with Kneebody in 2010, contemporary instrumental jazz as a leader in 2024 — fourteen years apart.