From Hank:
The postings have slowed down, but the music hasn’t stopped. I closed down my Seattle digs, and moved to the peaceful city of Ocean Shores - I enjoy the quiet, but time will tell how much of it I can take. Here are some musical moments we experienced in the past months while I’ve been setting up house here.
There was the KPLU Jazz Cruise: That was brunch on Elliot Bay with live entertainment by Pearl Django, a 4-man group that plays Gypsy Jazz with some Texas Swing and Latin flavoring. That’s my uneducated description. This nationally recognized Northwest group is worth going out of the way to see – we went all the way around Elliot Bay to do so. They’ve been interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered, which gives them all the credibility they need in my book - that and a listen to their music.
Hankster and the Lovely Claire performed at Ocean City State Park, just up the road from my home there. The park is sponsoring a series of Saturday night concerts this summer – a plus for performers and campers alike. This was basically busking with a PA system. A healthy number of kids and adults were drawn in by the music from their tents and motor homes for our 90-minute show.
Yesterday we finished recording our first CD.
Hank struggles with technology in the studio, as Claire looks on patiently
The recording was done at Synergy Sound in Port Townsend. Neville Pearsal was the recording engineer and was very helpful demystifying the digital recording process (www.synergysoundpt.com). We were assisted in production by the harpist Laurie Riley, an accomplished musician and teacher. She proved invaluable, keeping us on track and providing artistic guidance.
Neville Pearsall hard at work.
We pampered ourselves by staying in the downtown Bishop Victorian Hotel (constructed 1892) and enjoying the downtown eateries. There is still quite a bit of work editing and mastering the CD, and then all the packaging preparation; we’ll keep you posted on the progress.
Now we’re getting ready for the trip to the Tumbleweed Music Festival in the tri-cities area over the Labor Day weekend, and finding other new venues to play.
From Claire:
We’re just beginning the process of creating a CD and it’s already clear why nearly every CD has a “thanks to…” section somewhere in the packaging. Ours certainly will. A big “Thank you” goes to Laurie Riley, who added her “tasty” banjo playing to a couple of Hank’s originals.
We are going to migrate this blog-style site to a more conventional website with the name hanknclaire.com. We hope to have everything you are looking for (events, mp3s, videos, etc.) a single click away at the most. More about that soon.