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Music veteran Tommy Chris explores world beats
By JOHN BENSON
Veteran Youngstown area musician Tommy Chris is hoping his new project, TCX, which includes Findlay-based artist Roger Hatfield, will lead to a new chapter of his career.
“Roger is a featured sax player, producer, keyboardist, and we’ve been working together for many years,” said Chris, a 1975 Warren G. Harding High School graduate. “We’ve written tons of songs together. He’s done things on his own. I’ve done things on my own. Now together we’ve created TCX and explored some new ground in world beats and Eastern scales. We’ve kind of married it with our R&B, soul-funk background, so the style you could say is more universal R&B.”
Among the songs on the act’s self-titled debut, Chris points to the commercial- sounding “It’s Your Turn to Shine” and the moderate funk-sounding “Who We Are” as defining the album that the duo created without ever sharing a moment together in the studio.
“It was kind of exciting in the way that this was done via the Internet,” Chris said. “This was my first experience doing that. The way we worked it, he would produce tracks and e-mail them to me. And I would do all of the vocals, and then I would send them back to him, and he would do mix down and finishing touches.
“Actually, it was great. I preferred it because I was able to take my time and do the vocals in my studio. I wasn’t on any time constraint, and I didn’t have to worry about cost of studio time. I just took my time and did things the way I wanted to do them. And it worked out surprisingly well, much better than I imagined it ever would.”
For the past 30-some years, Chris has been exploring his musical talents in various forms. First as a touring member of ’60s and ’70s band Dennis Yost and the Classics IV, then as a solo act who over the decades has opened up for the likes of Clarence Clemons, The Average White Band, Gary Wright and Ambrosia. When he’s not playing (he does more than 150 shows locally a year), the Warren native and Boardman resident can be seen on his own arts and entertainment- based public-access cable show “TCTV,” which airs on Armstrong and Time Warner Cable.
However, he admits his focus is now on the potential of TCX, which hopes to announce a Northeast Ohio show later this summer. Considering the fact the album was created via the Internet, it’s fitting that the duo is exploring all of the new millennium opportunities available to bands these days. Not only is the outfit working with an Australian distributor, but it also has been busy uploading songs to indie radio stations looking for new music.
“Hopefully this will work out for us,” Chris said. “We’re working different things. Where before when we were younger, we just called people, but now with Internet, other doors have opened up. So there are things we’ve never tried before we’re trying right now. I think this has the potential to go farther than anything else I’ve done before.”