Colin Hancock’s Jazz Hounds featuring Catherine Russell - Cat & the Hounds
(Turtle Bay Records, 2025)
No other period in the evolution of jazz is as sunny,d hopeful, humorous, and friendly as its dawning. Listeners and critics often neglect traditional jazz in favor of the hyper-refined ambient style of music presently popular as “post-post bop, neo-classical jazz” most popular today. But many keepers of the traditional flame exist who migrate to labels like Arbors Jazz, Nagel Heyer, Dot Time, Storyville, and Turtle Bay Records.
The latter of these labels is a newcomer responsible for notable traditional releases such as Hannah Gill’s, Everyone Loves a Lover (2023); and Spooky Jazz, Vols. 2 (2024) and 3 (2025); Terry Waldo and The Gotham City Band’s Treasury, Vols. 1 (2024) and 2 (2025); Ricky Alexander’s Just Found Joy (2024); and Sweet Megg’s Bluer Than Blue (2024).
Colin Hancock's Jazz Hounds, led by Afro-Romani cornetist, saxophonist, historian, and producer Colin Hancock, provide the label with Cat & the Hounds, a collaboration with noted vocalist Catherine Russell (My Ideal (Dot Time, 2024), That Chick’s Too Young To Fry (Dot Time, 2024); Send For Me (Dot Time, 2022); and Bring It Back (Harmonia Mundi Jazz Village Music, 2014)) that celebrates the raucous spirit of early 1920s Black jazz and blues. The Jazz Hounds includes trombonist Dion Tucker, clarinettist Evan Christopher, banjo and guitarist Jerron Paxton, pianist Jon Thomas, drummer Ahmad Johnson, and tuba player Kerry Lewis, with Vince Giornano on bass saxophone and Hancock on C-melody saxophone. Together, they reimagine the sound of a hypothetical Creole ensemble at the dawn of the territory band.
Rooted in the 1920s shellac recordings and archival research, the album reinterprets both obscure and canonical material as restoration, not re-enactment. Named partly after Johnny Dunn’s Jazz Hounds, the group interpolates each member’s heritage into the performance complex of the cosmopolitan roots of Black popular music.
The album had its genesis in George Wein’s vision for a "History of Jazz" showcase at the 2020 Newport Jazz Festival. History took over with the pandemic canceling the festival and Wein passing away, putting the project to sleep. In 2023, a chance meeting of Russell and Hancock at a Brooklyn housewarming party blew on the fading coals of the project, leading to the birth of "Cat & the Hounds."
"Panama Limited Blues" kicks things off, reflecting the path of Catherine Russell's father, Luis Russell, from Panama to Chicago. It continues with the period standard "Cake Walkin’ Babies From Home," inspired by Bessie Smith, and "Telephoning the Blues," featuring a fiery trombone solo by Dion Tucker. The recording’s high point is the dusted-off "Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama," a provocative vaudeville duet originally recorded by the husband and wife vaudeville act billed as "Butterbeans & Susie (Jodie "Butterbeans" Edwards and Susie Hawthorne) who kicked around the “Chitlin Circuit" during the 1920s, recording the song on August 11th 1930 in New York City. It is a beautiful example of the blues craft of the double entendre handsomely updated by Russell and Hancock here.
Hancock and Russell aim to discredit the impression that the origins of the blues are solely in the Delta acoustic guitar style, highlighting the contributions of violinists, conservatory-trained pianists, and artists rooted in classical, Caribbean, and African American traditions. "Cat & the Hounds" fills a musical gap, offering a rich, informative, and historically illuminating album that restores depth and breadth to a too-often flattened history.
