Listen to Terry Hanck sing and play sax and you’ll hear his personality coming through loud and clear. Grease to Gravy, his new CD release on Little Village, showcases a deep groove drenching with soul on each track. The music is varied—from soul to blues to New Orleans second-line funk to rock ’n’ roll—and yet each comes straight from Hanck’s soul. His songs are at once fresh and stimulating, yet comfortably familiar, displaying a conscious decision by Hanck to put his own stamp on every song, whether he wrote it or not.
“I always want the song to have that groove in it, and to get some kind of feeling across,” Hanck says. “After all these years I’m at the point where I feel comfortable enough to bring songs alive. Even when I do someone else’s song, I want it to feel natural. I don’t want it to sound like I am trying to recreate something, but I am creating something that has its own vitality.”
The seven Hanck original songs and five covers here are each unveiled gracefully and soulfully. Producer Kid Andersen—who, as a 21-year-old Norwegian blues wunderkind more than two decades ago, emigrated to the U.S. to join Hanck’s band—supervised the production at his Greaseland studio in San Jose, Calif.
Hanck is best known for his sax playing, refined over six decades, but he’s also a charismatic singer whose voice possesses unique charm and warmth. He gently jazzes up Wilson Pickett’s “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” from a swaggering statement to a soothing warning with a combination of warm vocals and easing sax play.
His song “Goin’ Way Back Home Tonight” harkens back to Cosimo Matassa’s studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans in the mid-1950s, when Fats Domino and Little Richard were churning out their own brand of rock ’n’ roll. The song possesses some of the same devil-may-care attitude of those times. The rollicking “Run Run Baby” is a Hanck original first recorded years ago with a jazz groove but updated here with a grittier feel, Hanck taking on the role of a ’50s R&B soul shouter.
Everything on Grease to Gravy grooves mightily, but that’s because it’s a clear reflection of Hanck’s playing and singing.
—Michael Kinsman
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