Long time readers will know that we've been following Colin Hancock for almost all of our five years. Back in 2016 we discovered him as he was planning a concert at his now alma mater, Cornell, to celebrate the centennial of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first recordings. I profiled him for our cover in February 2018, and we've reviewed a few of his releases before.
In every story I've written about Colin I've told readers to seek out the multitrack recordings he releases on YouTube, and encouraged him to release them as an album. He finally has.
While still in 5th grade Hancock started to experiment with the process of layering tracks of himself playing one instrument over another to create a one man band recording. To accomplish these required him learning all the instruments of a typical jazz band. It was, he said in our first interview, “out of necessity…I wanted to hear what it would sound like if these ideas I had were played by a group. No one in my age group can [play these instruments] so I’ll do this and be able to put these ideas on a recording.”
Even as he got older and found musical peers he never stopped making multitrack recordings. Sometimes he would combine the process with his other hobby of experimenting with cylinder record machines and cut his overdubs to cylinder blanks. He even recently developed a way to record 78 rpm records acousticall
