On Friday, November 10, Colin Hancock received a GRAMMY nomination as producer of Archeophone’s The Moaniest Moan of them All: The Jazz Saxophone of Loren McMurray, 1920-1922.
As Colin announced on Facebook that afternoon, “The Moaninest Moan of Them All has been nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY for Best Historical Album!! Loren McMurray is finally getting the recognition he deserves!! AND I’m a GRAMMY nominated PRODUCER now! Thank you so much to the family at Archeophone Records for taking on projects like this! They’re a beacon of light in an industry that normally turns their nose on anything recorded before microphones.
“Shoutout to my co-producers Rich Martin for making Mac sing again with his amazing restorations of the original 78s and Meagan Hennessey for curating and creating the amazing graphics (that album cover y’all), and my co-author Mark Berresford for his pioneering research on Mac and hard work in general making the world aware of this music!”
Syncopated Times Associate Editor Joe Bebco lauded the compilation in our September 2023 issue. “At this late date, anyone claiming a place for an obscure musician alongside the giants of his instrument has a burden of proof. The people behind this album, including Meagan Hennessey, Mark Berresford, Colin Hancock, digital restorer Richard Martin, and Archeophone Records, have met that burden. This release is well-conceived, wonderfully researched, beautifully and effectively laid out, informative to the layperson, ear-opening, and immensely enjoyable to the listener. I want to create a rating scale just to give it a ten out of ten for what a historical album released in 2023 can be. If producing a CD is an art, The Moaninest Moan is a Michelangelo. It’s perfection. A balance of form and function.”
Colin Hancock re-enacted the Buddy Bolden cylinder sessions while still in High School in Texas. Since then, he organized The Original Cornell Syncopators while a college undergraduate, created a panoply of amazing overdubbed performancess for YouTube, and reverse-engineered the process for acoustic disc recording, issued recordings both privately and through Rivermont and Archeophone, receiving a previous GRAMMY nod for his liner notes for The Missing Link: How Gus Haenschen Got Us from Joplin to Jazz and Shaped the Music Business.
A profile of Colin appeared in the February 2018 issue of The Syncopated Times during his junior year at Cornell University He currently lives in Austin, Texas, and is studying for his degree at The University of Texas School of Law.
