Nils Landgren Funk Unit
For more than thirty years, the concerts performed by the Swedish trombonist and our continent's busiest jazz musician Nils 'Mr Red Horn' Landgren with his metallic red trombone and his totally-in-the-groove Funk Unit have attracted euphoric praise from Stockholm to Peking. Nils Landgren laid the foundation stone for his in Europe unparalleled career as an instrumentalist, singer, producer, mentor, big band leader and festival director in 1994. What is taken for granted today was certainly not a given at the time when the band got together: that Europeans can actually play funk, or should even be allowed to. Until then, the soul and jazz funk of a James Brown or an Aretha Franklin had solely been an American domain. However, in only a short time, Landgren and his band proved that European musicians could not only hold their own, but also add their own accents to this sound. Countless funk formations now ply their trade all over Europe, but the Nils Landgren Funk Unit is still their undisputed chieftain. The songs on their anniversary CD Raw, recorded last year to mark a band history that spanned 30 years, again aimed precisely 'for the soul's most reliable target: they go straight to the heart', as the newspaper Die Welt wrote.