Charlie Hunter Trio

Watch out. Here comes Charlie.
Just off a stint in Europe touring with his rhythm compatriot Bobby Previte, Charlie Hunter is home for a spell, gearing up for his next trio adventure. In a few weeks, he’ll be hitting the road again with his in-the-pocket collaborators, saxophonist John Ellis and drummer Derrick Phillips, supporting their new Ropeadope CD, Friends Seen and Unseen, scheduled for May release.
Meanwhile, Chuck’s just happy to be spending some family time in Montclair, New Jersey and practicing his eight-string guitar. “It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been able to practice every day,” Hunter says. “I’m ready to start a new chapter in my playing. Every night in the past year I reached these dead ends in my improvising. So, I made mental notes about working on how to plow through these dead ends or get around them.”
With equal parts moxie, humor, hard work and brilliant musicianship, Hunter has made a career out of taking his music to new levels of technique, soul, depth and innovation. It’s significant that his new CD is a trio outing, given that his first album as a leader—the fine Charlie Hunter Trio released on Primus’ Les Claypool’s Prawn Song label distributed by Mammoth—arrived a decade ago.
After exploring a range of band configurations since then, including solo, duo, quartet and quintet, Hunter is back to tripartite improvisation, with renewed commitment and a satchel full of roadblock-busting concepts and praxis. Over the years, he’s successfully steered clear of ruts. While keeping the groove element deep and funky, he’s charted a more expansive musical course—developing an acute sense of lyricism and, as evidenced in his striking balladry, a passionate romanticism. With its scamper beats, cool grooves, blues-bent notes, wah-wah riffs and stop-and-start fluidity, Friends Seen and Unseen is light years away in beauty and variety from Hunter’s early—and elementary—outings. Charlie has graduated and is poised for another round of post-graduate studies.
Last fall, at the Lower East Village jazz club Tonic, he talked about the trio while scarfing down a plate of beans and rice before a show. A unique guitarist who wields an eight-string model that he employs to simultaneously play bass lines, rhythm riffs and melodic leads, Hunter decided earlier in the year to return to the trio format. “I disbanded my quintet because I was going broke,” he said matter-of-factly. “I couldn’t afford to tour with them anymore. It was great writing for that group, but it’s hard to have a quintet or even a quartet exist in this economy.”
Yet this misfortune led Hunter to rediscover the silver lining of a trio. “It’s great having a rhythmic voice and a melodic voice to fit with what I do, which is a combination of rhythm and melody,” he said. “Three is the ultimate in communication. With a quartet, you add another voice but you lose the improvisational ability to stop on a dime. It’s like driving a huge truck compared to being behind the wheel of a Porsche. You cover the entire road with a trio. You can play melodies and counter-melodies and make quick turns. I’ve found with John and Derrick that we can play more open and go into places we’ve never gone before.”
That was illustrated a couple of minutes later at sound check when Hunter fumbled several times through an Ellis arrangement of the traditional song “John Brown.” He followed Ellis’ sax line, then blurted out, “Ahhhhhgh! This is so hard. But let’s try it again really fast so I won’t embarrass myself tonight.” Finally, he succeeded.
“John put all these crazy chords into the arrangement, so it’s difficult to play,” Hunter told me later. “But it’s really fun. Doing this is a challenge. It puts me into a different place I normally wouldn’t go.’’
How does this trio compare to the one he piloted in his early days when he was helping to spearhead the new music movement on San Francisco’s jazz club scene? “Oh, it’s so different,” he said. “What I lacked in musicianship back then, I made up for with sheer will. I was all over the place, and my time was all over the place. We were young, fearless and full of testosterone energy. Now I play with a lot of restraint. I’m more interested in playing in different voicings, like with the wah-wah pedal or playing edgy tones—more melodic gestures instead of fast bebop lines.”
He paused and noted, “I was raw and funky and ragged ten years ago. That was before I met all these incredible artists, people like Bobby, who taught me how to mix paradigms in the music and create new things, instead of staying comfortable in one zone. They increased my musicianship and musicality. That was my motivation in moving to New York in the first place.”
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That change of life came in 1997 after Charlie had lived most of his life in Berkeley, the university city across the Bay from San Francisco. It was home base before his relocation East.
A great story teller with a quick wit and pronounced sense of humor