The Jazz River—Kip Hanrahan Records Sound Like No Others

Kip Hanrahan is an Auteur. He actually studied film making with Jean-Luc Goddard and Jean-Paul Satre. An Irish-Jew who grew up in the Bronx, he brings together everyone he knows (and everyone knows him) to create a unique border-less neighborhood.

Kip Hanrahan knows there is magic in numbers, especially 2 and 3; the Clave. He sometimes uses three electric basses and an acoustic like layers of cooking. He knows every drummer in New York with a Cuban-Puerto-Rican connection. They love playing with him because he can also play. Saxophonists from Eddie Harris to David Murray, from Charles Neville to JD Allen, they’re happy to blow over whatever groove these rhythm masters lay down. Same with Leo Nocentelli, Brandon Ross, and Arto Lindsay whose guitars and banjos happily join the party.

His songs are full of poetic images of sex and politics, men and women negotiating terrains. Music and words both sensual and haunting, disarmingly intimate, meet where magic and mystery happen on the street corner, all of it moving with that Clave heartbeat.  If he had perhaps started 20 years later than in the early 80s, he would have been a leader on the wave that ushered world fusion into the ear holes of a record-buying public. Alas, few even know his name. But no one makes records like Kip Hanrahan.

Tune in to the Jazz River on Sunday, January 24, at 5 pm to discover the music of Kip Hanrahan, only on KUVO Jazz.

Stay connected to KUVO’s programs and our community’s activities: Sign up for the station’s Oasis Online E-newsletter today!