Jnbo is the solo project of Henry Jenkins — Melbourne/Naarm-based composer, producer and bass player, best known as the in-house engineer at College Of Knowledge Records and the producer behind Surprise Chef, Karate Boogaloo, and the Grammy-nominated Frollen Music Library.
Debut album & Friends brings together a rotating cast of collaborators from Karate Boogaloo, Surprise Chef and The Cactus Channel, recorded using a fixed ensemble of eight instruments — a self-imposed creative constraint Jenkins used to explore how much variation he could draw from the same personnel and setup across 12 tracks.
The resulting record moves between picturesque ambience and head-nodding funk, with three guitars and three keyboards precisely arranged across the stereo field — drawing on the influences of Bernard Herrmann, Les Baxter and Lamont Dozier while maintaining an unmistakably eccentric voice of its own.
Jenkins explains the conceptualisation of & Friends:
“I wanted to write a record I would look forward to recording with my friends. The music I was writing had a funk sensibility in the bass and drums, contrasted by a more cinematic approach in the harmonic and melodic content, with guitars slipping and sliding in between. I tried to make that contrast the character of the record. I felt that every song should have the same instrumentation and with the same personnel. This became an enjoyable creative constraint; how much variation could I pull out of the same 8 instruments over the course of the album? I wanted to find as much diversity as I could within these tight bounds.”