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| Terry Hanck is a classic case of "paying one's dues" before fame comes calling. After 30-odd years of playing alongside more celebrated blues artists like Elvin Bishop, Etta James, Albert Collins, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Miller, Robert Cray, Charlie Musselwhite, and a host of other big-name performers, it's high time for Mr. Hanck to come into his own! The superbly powerful tenor saxophonist and vocalist was born in Chicago but has made California his home base. Mr. Hanck has succeeded in creating a sexy and exciting musical "period piece" that centers around late '50s/early '60s blues and r&b (think Ben E. King, Percy Sledge, Junior Walker & the All-Stars, Sam and Dave, etc.). There's even some big-band influence thrown in for good measure! Mr. Hanck composed (with additional credit given to Old Toby Pub) almost half of the 14 tracks, which fit right in with well-chosen covers by Eddie Bo, H.P. Barnum, D. Bartholomew/P.King, Clara Wills, D. Malone/J. Scott and James Wayne, to complete the overall theme of healing a broken heart. Practically the entire collection is a ready-made soundtrack for a filmmaker intent on capturing the sophisticated sounds of that time period. My favourite tracks, though, are actually the original compositions, a fact that makes me hope that Terry Hanck's next effort will be completely his own material. He is a master at manipulating his saxophone to produce instantly likeable and memorable jump-blues like "Hard As You Can" and "Itchy Twitchy", lowdown, dirty-sweet blues like "You Could Have Let Me Go" (the only extended track) and "Cryin' Fool", the classic rhythm & blues waltz of the title track and the more uptempo "She Ain't Coming Back", featuring award-winning guitarist-singer-songwriter Lloyd Jones (Brown Sugar, Curtis Salgado). There seems to be a trend today to go for the "musical chairs" approach when recording, i.e. alternating several guitarists/drummers/keyboardists instead of having just a single line-up, presumably to display as many different playing techniques as possible from track to track. It certainly works in this instance. It would then boil down to personal preferences whether the guitar stylings of Junior Watson (Canned Heat) are more appealing than that of the equally talented but totally different Mike Schermer (another Charlie Musselwhite alumnus) and Chris "Kid" Anderson, who also assisted in the production and mixing, along with mix-master Alan Goldwater. The same applies for the other alternating groups of instrumentalists (piano, bass and drums) contributing on the CD, who are way too numerous to mention individually. I was very pleased that all tracks were double-layered with either a piano or organ - my favourite instrument! The seemingly genuine agony Terry Hanck expresses in his vocals (which are on the same power level as Mark Dufresne) actually made me wince at times, out of embarrassment and empathy for him. Let's hope he's just a great "performer" and that he hasn't really been left hurtin' so bad! |
| I KEEP ON HOLDIN' ON - TERRY HANCK |
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