BEAT WEEK: GREAT DANES

Bjarne Rosvold & Perry Knudsen: Magonde

Available on Copenhagen Dancefloor Classics II

European jazz and soul have been a fascination of mine – when the Groove Merchant’s Cool Chris first suggested to me that this might be the next big collector’s craze, my initial reaction was, “European funk? C’mon – you’re kidding right” but in those young, naive days of mine (ok, this was in 2000), I just didn’t realize how massively deep the European scene goes. After all, it is, ya know, a continent. One with quite excellent taste in American music at that, better than our own at times.

Case in point – they’ve managed to put out at least two volumes of just Danish dancefloor jazz/funk/soul. I’m sure that’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg and you could churn out countless more anthologies that look at Swedish, or Finnish, or Dutch, etc. goodies too (let’s not even get into France, England, Italy and Germany – we’ll be here all year). In any case, for Beat Week, I selected this insanely good percussion track from the Danish team of Bjarne Rosvold (the drummer) and Perry Knudsen called “Magonde,” taken from the Copenhagen Dancefloor Classics II compilation from a few years back. This is the kind of breakbeat track that DJs usually only dream about – it just keeps going and going and going, but switches up patterns rather than sound like a loop on permanent repeat. Reminds me a little of the Klauss Weiss’ “Niagara” track for those who know (maybe a future post) but packed into 3 minutes rather than 30.

By the way, if anyone knows what the original LP this cut is from, I’d love to know. I tried doing some research but turned up nada. Thanks…