Nils Landgren - 5000 Miles (CD)

Release Date: 10/01/99

Nils Landgren Funk Unit featuring Tim Hagans, Roy Hargrove, Don Alias and Fred Wesley.

The secret of Landgren´s Funk Unit sound is the relaxed atmosphere in conjunction with players on the same wave length. Funk lives from joy, spontaneity, and a pinch of cockiness, which re-emerge in the music as intensity, a fascination for structure, and groove. There, where the jazz player presses towards ever newer variations and ever more abstract realms, the soul man is grounded in rhythm, directness, and feeling. The uniting of the two musical worlds and the personal stylistic preferences of those involved are a part of the reason for the high artistic level of arrangements and integrated inspiration, coolness and discipline, feeling and reduction which are all brought together. Landgren is able to forge these links because he is at home in so many different stylistic camps. The wide range of individual expression carries over into his Funk Unit, whose group sound has matured over a period of almost twenty years into an incredibly heterogeneous complexity. Since the first musical attempts in 1981, and the major successes of Live In Stockholm and Paint It Blue, Scandinavia´s crispest, earthiest soul jazz combo has developed into an international super group which is ecstatically celebrated from Montreux to Canada. 5000 Miles continues in the past musical directions, adding impetuous, wild, undiluted, delicate, tender moments. From the hypnotically pulsing slow beat of the Björk´s Venus as a Boy through the slowly building trance structure of the title piece, to the happily grooving Da Fonk, 5000 Miles takes stock of the possibilities of interpretation within the tension between black tradition and white reflection. And so Nils Landgren´s Funk Unit sounds more real, authentic, and compact than ever: a sharp sound synopsis for the coming musical millennium, and a view of the creative perspective of a band that has begun to recognize their immense opportunities.