Taana Gardner

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Taana Gardner is an American disco and post-disco singer from Newark, New Jersey, born in 1960. Her grandmother was an opera singer and gave her singing lessons from the age of five. By eleven she was active in the theatre, and before she was a teenager she had already written plays that were staged at Lincoln Center. Her arrival on the dance scene was really a matter of chance. On Thanksgiving Day 1978 the producer Kenton Nix was looking for a singer for his track Work That Body because the singer he had planned to use had fallen ill. Gardner stepped in and recorded the vocals.

Music and breakthrough

The DJ Larry Levan of the Paradise Garage remixed the track, and it became an instant club hit. So began a run of records for West End Records, a New York label that released a great deal of influential disco. Her debut album Taana Gardner appeared in 1979. In 1981 came Heartbeat, her biggest record. It is a long, tight dance record with a low, slow groove, far removed from the glossy disco of the late 1970s.

Influence

Heartbeat continued to resonate for a long time. It served as the basis for other tracks, including in hip hop and in Ini Kamoze's 1995 hit Here Comes the Hotstepper. In this way Gardner is one of the voices that bridge disco, New York club culture and hip hop.

Listening

• 
  Heartbeat · Taana Gardner, 1981
  Apple Music ↗

Discography

Studio albums

• 1979Taana Gardner