Terry Hanck - Grease to Gravy LP

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 each are 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-1950’s 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 and 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