BEAT FUNKTION "VOODOOLAND"
Beat Funktion was born in 2007 in the Swedish town of Uppsala, just
north of Stockholm, as a temporary five-piece constellation for a number
of spontaneous club gigs where traditional jazz music was needed for a
young dancing audience. To shape the band's repertoire of old jazz
standards, pianist Daniel Lantz took the liberty of borrowing
inspiration from musicians and bands within groove-based genres in the
70s and late 60s, such as James Brown, Bob James, Eumir Deodato, Herbie
Hancock, Roy Ayers, Fela Kuti, Curtis Mayfield, Lonnie Liston Smith,
Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and others, not to
mention film music by composers like Lalo Schifrin and Bill Conti. This
resulted in a series of original arrangements of jazz standards
tailor-made for the band, which utilized the stable, dance-friendly and
lush-sounding framework of pumping disco funk and R&B paired with
the rhythmic and harmonic freedom of jazz improvisation. It became an
immediate success with audiences, and accordingly, the very special
jazz-funk sound of the band was born.After a number of overwhelmingly successful performances, enjoyed by
listeners as well as dancers, the band became a permanent working unit
and since 2008 it is an impressive six-piece-band consisting of Karl
Olandersson on the trumpet, Olle Thunström on the tenor sax, Johan Öijen
on the electric guitar, Daniel Lantz on the Fender Rhodes, Pal Johnson
on the electric bass and Jon Eriksson on the drums. Although keeping a
few classic funk cover tunes as part of the repertoire, pianist Daniel
Lantz nowadays provides the band with new, groovy original music in the
vintage 70s vein. Additional musicians like percussionists and vocalists
occasionally join the band for more powerful live performances.In the autumn of 2010, Beat Funktion released their debut-album THE
PLUNGE for Do Music Records, a production that has culled takes together
from multiple previous studio and live recordings to form a whole. On
the album, the sound of the band is enhanced with percussion, live
acoustic strings, vocals and Moog synthesizers. It features a majority
of Lantz' own compositions, plus a funk version of George Gershwin's
classic jazz standard ”Summertime”. The disc has received praise
worldwide with agents and reviewers of jazz, funk, soul and rare
grooves, not to mention DJs. The band is currently scheduling their fourth album, MANDY'S SECRET, to
be released in August of 2014, which will be co-produced by Daniel Lantz
and pianist and producer Mats Björke from famed rock band Mando Diao. BEAT FUNKTION
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