Qirko pays tribute to area with new album

By WAYNE BLEDSOE, bledsoe@knews.com
Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 20, 2007

Knoxville audiences may think they know Hector Qirko. For two decades, Qirko has been known for his electric blues group the Hector Qirko Band, his rock playing with R.B. Morris and his country-rock style with the Lonesome Coyotes. However, Qirko's upcoming album, "Wherever You Go," may change any preconceptions about the musician.

The disc is a nearly all-acoustic effort and includes bluegrass and a number of very East Tennessee-sounding numbers.

"This reflects how I feel about this area - as an adopted East Tennessean," says Qirko over lunch at the Sunspot restaurant on Cumberland Avenue.

Qirko readily admits his route to Knoxville was an unusual one. His father was a native Albanian, and his mother was from Cuba. The two met in New York City in an English-language class. Qirko's father landed a job with a multinational corporation, and the family moved from New York to Havana, Cuba, to Sao Paolo, Brazil, and to Bogota, Colombia.

"I grew up moving every two years," says Qirko. "I never had a home in that sense. I grew up an asphalt kid. I just moved from one larger city to the next larger city."

Qirko came across his first guitar when his parents won a classical guitar in a raffle while the family was living in Brazil. Shortly thereafter, though, The Beatles hit, and even Sao Paolo wasn't immune to the band's music.

"From that moment on, my goal was to be in a band like The Beatles so I could be George Harrison" says Qirko.

Still, most rock music was hard to come by in South America. Over the years, Qirko would read about rock acts in the Latin American editions of Time magazine and ask his father to bring him back albums when he traveled for business. It wasn't until Qirko moved to Chicago in 1970 that he had regular access to American music.

"It was heaven," says Qirko. "It was like I got to Mecca. I could hear all the music I wanted."

He also found willing musical accomplices and joined a blues band, although all of his knowledge of blues had come secondhand from listening to rock groups. One night blues guitar great Lonnie Brooks heard Qirko playing slide guitar and invited him to join his group.

"It wasn't until I was playing with him that I realized, 'This is Chicago blues!' " Qirko says.

With Brooks, Qirko had the chance to play with a wealth of blues greats who would sit in with the band.

"A lot of times, I wouldn't really know who they were until later," says Qirko. "Freddy King, Albert King, Hound Dog Taylor, James Cotton ."

Qirko first came to Knoxville to visit a friend. A trip to the Smoky Mountains became an epiphany.

"I can say it was the first time I had ever been to the woods," says Qirko. "I was a Boy Scout in Bogota, but they were afraid to let us go into the woods. We were tying knots in the church basement."

During the Smokies trip, Qirko and his friends were riding in a convertible when a rain shower hit.

"We were just doused, and I was ecstatic," says Qirko. "In a way, that was the day I came home. That balance between being in the city and being in the woods, the mood here and the music that goes along with all of that ."

Qirko moved to Knoxville in the late 1970s. In the following years, he would be a part of beloved Knoxville punk act Balboa and country-rock act the Lonesome Coyotes, and he would become part of the house band on "I-40 Paradise" and "Pickin' at the Paradise," two of The Nashville Network's first original programs. Yet over the past 20 years, Qirko has become best known fronting his own band or accompanying Morris on electric guitar. He's built up a stack of acoustic songs that haven't fit anywhere until he recorded his new album.

"This is what 'home' sounds like to me," says Qirko.