Four Tracks of Wah-Wah Guitars and Analog Synths Chase the 70s Screen Era
Wah-wah guitars snap. An electric piano vamps, and a fat analog bassline peels off down a Los Angeles side street. That is the opening posture of Cops & Thieves, the four-track EP from Italian electronic project Jazztronic. It arrived on 12 June as a straight-faced love letter to the funk that powered 1970s American cop shows. Founder Luca Bani chases one very specific feeling: the moment a title sequence kicks in and a muscle car takes a corner too fast.
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Jazztronic Reworks the 70s Studio Toolkit Into Four High-Speed Funk Cues
Everything about Jazztronic’s Cops & Thieves points back to a single decade. The four tracks lean on the tools that defined the era: wah-wah guitars, electric pianos, analog synthesizers, and a super-groovy bass. That bass keeps moving under frenetic, tireless rhythms. Jazztronic treats those ingredients as a working kit, not a museum display. The EP plays like a set of cues you could drop under a foot chase through San Francisco or a stakeout on a rain-slick boulevard.
The imagery is just as specific. Think speed, action, and blazing city streets. Cars tear through Los Angeles and San Francisco while the rhythm section refuses to let up. Bell-bottoms, arabesque jackets, and bright shirts come with the territory. This is music for movement, and every track keeps one foot on the accelerator.
Modern Production Keeps the Cops & Thieves Chase Sound Present-Day Sharp
Strong production keeps Cops & Thieves from tipping into costume-party pastiche. Bani gives the vintage gear a clean, modern low end. The grooves hit with present-day weight while the top end keeps its warm retro grain. The wah-wah guitars sound bitten rather than sampled. The electric piano carries real hand feel, and the analog synths growl instead of gleaming.
At four tracks, the EP is a deliberate size. It runs long enough to establish a mood and short enough to keep every idea sharp, closer to a run of television cues than a sprawling album. Nothing overstays its welcome. The sequencing keeps the tempo high from the first bar to the last.
The EP wears its screen references openly. You can hear the swagger of Starsky & Hutch and the jet-set cool of The Persuaders in the phrasing. The whole record moves at the pace of a chase sequence, all forward motion and hard corners. Bani wants to honour that world without turning it into a cliché, and the restraint shows. The tracks salute the era rather than quote it line for line.
A Lineage of Screen Funk From Hayes, Mayfield and Schifrin
To place Cops & Thieves, it helps to name the company it keeps. This is the sound Isaac Hayes stamped on popular culture in 1971. The wah-wah guitar of his “Theme from Shaft” turned a detective picture into a groove that outlived the film. Curtis Mayfield mapped the same world on Super Fly a year later. There, a walking, super-groovy bass carried as much of the story as any line of dialogue. The EP also shares blood with the brass-and-percussion action scores Lalo Schifrin built for high-speed screen chases. Schifrin made a revving engine and a bassline feel like the same instrument.
Jazztronic is not copying any of them, and the record never pretends otherwise. The link is stylistic. It is the same palette and the same appetite for motion, rebuilt with electronic tools those originals never had. For a listener raised on those scores, the EP works as recognition. For a younger crowd, it is a clean doorway into a groove their playlists rarely serve.
That balance is the whole trick: reverence for the source, comfort with modern gear. Plenty of retro projects lean so hard on nostalgia that they forget to write memorable parts. Jazztronic keeps the hooks doing real work, so the grooves stick even if you have never seen a frame of 70s television.
Who Cops & Thieves Is For, From 70s Crate-Diggers to Late-Night Drivers
The audience here is wide by design. It is roughly anyone from 30 to 99 who lights up at a good title theme. That covers the crate-diggers who already own the originals. It covers the playlist-builders hunting for instrumental funk with a story attached. It covers the casual listener who just wants four tracks of bell-bottom energy. The pitch underneath it all is simple: 70s cop movies, and the music that drove them, still make the best company for a late-night drive.
There is a generational hook here too. Listeners old enough to catch these shows first time round get a jolt of recognition. Their kids and grandkids get an easy way into a style that streaming playlists rarely gather in one place. Bani bets that the appeal cuts across all of it, and the wide age range he names, 30 to 99, is no throwaway line.
Jazztronic, the Florence-based electronic and pop project Bani leads, has built its catalogue around atmospheric, melody-first music. Cops & Thieves funnels that instinct into a tighter, funkier frame. Bani is candid about the goal. With Cops & Thieves, he says, the aim was “to capture that raw energy and bring it into today’s soundscape, creating something that feels both nostalgic and excitingly new.” Across these four tracks, that raw energy survives the trip intact.
GetMusic.News curator team: “The trick with a tribute is knowing what to leave alone. Jazztronic keeps the wah-wah guitars and analog synths front and centre and refuses to over-modernise them, which is exactly why Cops & Thieves reads as a salute rather than a copy.”
If any of that speaks to you, the EP is the quickest way in. Stream Cops & Thieves on Spotify. Follow Jazztronic across Apple Music, Deezer, Bandcamp, the YouTube channel, Instagram, and Facebook for whatever the project revs up next.
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