Stan Zeff
DJ, Producer
Biography
From the London Underground warehouse parties of the late 80s, to spinning at music festivals on the Caribbean Sea, DJ Stan Zeff stayed true to the sound and spirit of house music.
As a student of London sound systems, Stan Zeff built speaker boxes and amplifiers while building his career as a DJ. “Back in the day you couldn’t be a DJ without belonging to a sound system. You had to know how to connect and tune up a sound, and above all, you needed to know how to select music,” Zeff explains. Little did he know at the time that his early years as a DJ and his experience with sound systems would come into play as house music’s emergence required such expertise for its unique mechanical beats and deeper basslines.
Whether or not people warmed up to the new musical genre, Stan Zeff believed in the power of its mesmerizing sound. So, he continued to tap London’s music scene, certain that his persistent plays would eventually win audiences over. During that time, he shared the platform with up-and-coming house DJs like Zepherin Saint, Jazzie B, Mr. C, and Eddie Richards. What emerged in 1988 was a movement with a new, culturally significant and unique sound that became the soundtrack for the biggest youth revolution since the 1960s, known as London’s “Summer of Love.” From that point, house music in the UK reached new heights, and Stan Zeff’s contributions confirm his place as one of its pioneers.
In 2000, Stan Zeff moved across the pond to Atlanta, Georgia to establish a musical footing as he did in the UK. In 2009, he founded Atlanta’s Tambor Party, a series of events that provided a platform for Stan Zeff and other DJs to amplify Afro House music, which fuses Kwaito, Tribal, Deep, and Soulful House music – a deviation from the commonplace music scene in the hip-hop capital. What culminated was a global dance movement that expanded to cities like New York, Miami, Toronto, Kefalonia (Greece), and Paris, where Stan Zeff has worked side by side with a roster of notable DJs in the house music scene such as Black Coffee, Louie Vega, Osunlade, Boddhi Satva, and Djeff Afrozila.
Stan Zeff has since expanded the Tambor brand to include the record label, Tambor Music, which focuses on the tambor and African sound, and the annual Tribe Tambor Cruise, a music festival at sea that features a lineup of globetrotting house music DJs.