This week’s gunslinger is packing a tenor saxophone.
Terry Hanck is the featured guest at Harrah’s Tuesday Night Blues, a weekly show hosted by the Buddy Emmer Blues Band. A guitarist typically is the featured artist, but Hanck is an esteemed sax man whose blues has a rock and roll bent.
Tim Parsons / Tahoe Onstage
Hanck is an eight-time Blues Music Awards nominee, including 2015 and 2016 Best Instrumentalist, Horn, an honor that he won in 2012. He also was the 2012 Living Blues Critics Choice winner for Best Horn.
A Chicago native, Hanck was inspired at a 1962 B.B. King concert. He moved to California in the late ’60s to surf and play music. He was a member of the Elvin Bishop Band during Bishop’s most commercially successful period from 1977-87.
“I went from playing in a club with three people who didn’t care, to all of a sudden doing the same thing at the Oakland Coliseum for a Day on the Green with 55,000 screaming people who loved it,” Hanck said.
During his days with Bishop, the band played numerous times at Harrah’s at the same area he plays Tuesday now called Center Stage.
Hanck has recorded numerous solo albums, the last few of which were produced by Kid Andersen. In 2001, Andersen moved from Norway to Northern California to join Hanck’s band.
Hanck plays a vintage 1967 Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone and he’s performed with some of the all-time greats, including Etta James, Bonnie Raitt, Allen Toussaint, Lee Dorsey, Tracy Nelson, Jimmy McCracklin and Sunnyland Slim.
This week he completes a three-week California tour before returning to his Florida home for an eight-day break. Then, for the 17th year, he will come back to California to play fairs in Pleasanton, Sacramento and Santa Rosa.
Related stories: Check out all the Tahoe Onstage blues stories. LINK
- Terry Hanck
Where: Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Center Stage
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 13, with the Buddy Emmer Blues Band
Cover: free
