Maurice Tani - All In! (2022)

El Cerrito, Calif. – Monday, March 28, 2022 – After a solid life as a working pro in large, touring dance bands, preceded by a long stint in the indie rock world with Flamin’ Groovies front man Roy Loney, Maurice Tani wanted to play his own music. As a composer who liked songs with linear stories, plot lines, and character development, he landed on country music with a twist, what one writer called “Hillbilly Noir’: he put on a cowboy hat and began to write and play, as one headline put it, “Americana without limits.”

In his new release from Little Village (LV), All In!, he’s gone even further. A few years of being part of Little Village gave him the feeling of being part of a musical family, in which the label is committed to building “a more empathetic world through the
commonality of music.”

“It’s like Jimmy (Pugh, LV’s executive director) has set up this sandbox everyone, regardless of their background, can play in.”

So he created wonderful narrative songs that really do cover pretty much all of the flavors of American music. One by one, he approached his Little Village friends and asked them to contribute to what he called the roux, the mix of musical influences, that you hear. By giving them only the sketchiest depictions of the songs and then saying as little as possible during the sessions, he asked each musician to contribute from their musical heart….and it worked. Over three sessions at Kid Andersen’s Greaseland Studios, with Kid on guitar and Jim Pugh on keys, they cooked up a very special and supremely tasty set of songs.