Interview: Colin Hancock's New Album Is a Living Restoration of Early 20s Jazz

On August 15, 2025, Afro-Romani cornetist, saxophonist, historian, and producer Colin Hancock’s Jazz Hounds will release Cat & the Hounds — a bold new album that revives the spirit of early 1920s Black jazz and blues with historical insight and contemporary urgency. Featuring three-time GRAMMY-nominated vocalist Catherine Russell, the band also includes trombonist Dion Tucker, multi-reedist Evan Christopher, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jerron Paxton, pianist Jon Thomas, drummer Ahmad Johnson, and tubist Kerry Lewis. Together, they reimagine the sound of a “lost” Creole territory band — one that never recorded, but left a profound cultural imprint.

Named in part for Johnny Dunn’s pioneering Jazz Hounds, the group channels each member’s heritage into vivid performances that honor the complex, cosmopolitan roots of Black popular music in the early recording age. Having grown up listening to my own grandfather playing blues records from the late 20s to early 30s, I was struck by the way the album captured the spirit of that era without suffering the degradation of old recordings from that time. The songs are crisp and clear, as if it was recorded last week, not 80 years ago. Listening to the album, it really felt like a band from that era had magically time traveled and given access to high-fidelity digital recording technology.

Hancock is also a historian himself with expertise into the way that early recording technology shaped how songs of the early 20s sounded, evoking the feeling that he and the group restored these songs to their original quality, something that’s really marvelous to hear. I spoke with Hancock about the new album, what got him into this era of music, and more.

You've said that your grandfather got your father into 1920s blues and jazz, and then your father in turn got you into it. What do you think it is about the sound and recording style that hooked you and made you want to recreate some of these sounds on your own?

The sound of acoustic recordings has always fascinated me. You have people around these big tin horns, distanced by the volume of their instruments. You’d step in for your solo and back off when the singer was singing into the horn. That process is how this music first made it onto record, and why a lot of the records sound the way they do from back then. Even when they introduced microphones a few years later, it was sort of the same, being distanced around one mic, or maybe two if you were recording for a larger company. So when I was first starting out, I was really drawn to that. It’s sort of like painting with a specific kind of paint. When you record with early technology, you are able to evoke a certain feeling and response in the listener they associate, and the best engineers from back then knew how to interact with their listeners through the technology. The way these records are made is really special, and I wanted to know all about it.

What has it been like working with Catherine Russell on the vocals for this album and recording her father's music?

There are certain musicians in your career who you hit it off with because of mutual admiration for certain musical heroes, but it’s not often that one is simultaneously one of your own heroes! Working with Cat has been a joy because she is so deep into the music’s roots, in addition to being the greatest living singer of classic blues.

As far as recording the music of Luis Russell is concerned, I’m all about connections and you don’t get much more of a direct connection than Cat. Through her, the album has connections that extend to people like Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Victoria Spivey, too many other pioneers to list. It also extends to the original records, and while we aren’t in the business of re-creation, revitalizing the spirit and style of those gems is where we thrive.

What's the most interesting aspect to you of recording music via old 1920s and 30s technology? Can you describe some of what you're trying to evoke by recording music that way?

Definitely the way it changes people’s relationship with vintage recordings. Hearing oneself back on an acoustic record seems to connect the dots for many folks as to what’s missing, what’s added, and what’s changed between it and the live performance. With that understanding and experience, people then approach those records with context and tuned ears, which make the records more approachable and better understood. And of course, knowing how the records are made gives the musicians respect for how incredible some of those records sound considering the conditions the musicians had to make music in.

My other goal with this technology is preserving an artform. In its day, this technology was the cutting edge. The folks who built and operated these recording lathes wore lab coats and closely guarded their individual secret methods for optimal sound. And as soon as the technology changed, people got rid of old technology fairly quickly, meaning not much remains. There are hardly any acoustic disc lathes in the world left, let alone operable ones–I once tried to get into an archive in a small town outside of Rome just to get photos of one, but it never worked out. Eventually I built one for myself out of parts from many different machines, and operated a studio in my New York apartment from 2022-2023.