Rhyton, Hans Chew

Rhyton is an experimental/improv/psych trio based in Brooklyn that features Dave Shuford (D. Charles Speer and the Helix, No Neck Blues Band), Jimy SeiTang (Psychic Ills) and Spencer Herbst (Messages, Matta Llama)


Death gives meaning to life, suffering gives meaning !to love.
This is the theme of Hans Chew's story, an expression of the soul.

Hans Chew delivers powerful medicine, a resurrection of rock & roll as unique as it is traditional. A Tennessee native and self-taught pianist, Chew's style has been described in wide fashion, his name appearing in print alongside artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Elton John, John Prine, Albert Ammons, Nicky Hopkins, and The Band, to name but a few. "My grandfather sang harmony in a Nashville gospel quartet and taught me that "high-lonesome sound". While my mother turned me on to Hendrix and the Stones, my father only listened to classical music: I knew Beethoven's Fifth before Led Zeppelin's fourth."

In 2004, after many years adrift, Chew took up permanent residence at the decrepit Clermont Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Armed with little more than a piano, an old Royal typewriter, a handful of New Orleans LPs, and a stack of ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie sheet music, Chew's journey to master the elements of rock and roll piano had begun. He checked out two years later with a handful of songs and moved to New York City. These songs would become Chew's 2010 debut album Tennessee & Other Stories…, which received four stars from Rolling Stone and was heralded by Uncut as one of the top 25 albums of the year.

Now Hans Chew returns with Life & Love, the sonic snapshot of a full-fledged rock and roll spectacle. Led by Chew on grand piano and vocals, with Dave Cavallo (guitar), Ricardo Ortiz (bass), and Jesse Wallace (drums), Life & Love transports the listener into the full experience of the band's immediate raw power.

Classic Rock magazine calls Life & Love "an excellent album, a further development of the sound Chew revealed on his debut Tennessee & Other Stories...", while Popmatters proclaims the album "Dixie-fried rock 'n' roll awesomeness...a barn burning smoker of a record that's simply irresistible."

Chew says, "If the inspiration for Tennessee & Other Stories... was rebirth from a death state, then Life & Love comes from the experience of negotiating life after rebirth." Dealing with the reality of life and the role that love plays in it, conceptually Life & Love isn't complex. Its imagery however, betrays another reality: through the course of the album the listener will encounter the creation and rise of civilization, temptation from across the railroad tracks, the cool hand of the goddess of mercy, a marriage between a nymph and the son of Zebedee, the ripping open of space and time, and last but not least, the Junco Partner himself. With plenty of blues, country, soul, and the distinct influence of British and southern American classic rock, the album's sound stands firmly on tradition as it bares its teeth.

Life & Love is available now on At The Helm Records and distributed by Proper Music Distribution.