Charlie Hunter's guitar has eight strings. He's still learning how to play it. "It's pretty damn difficult," he says with a laugh, and then attempts to explain in layman's language his technique on the hybrid guitar/bass instrument: "On the right hand is all the rhythmic counterpoint, the thumb taking care of the bass, fingers taking care of the guitar. The left hand is all the conception, putting down fingers on particular notes, creating harmonic/melodic counterpoint." He pauses. A hint of a sigh. "It's like juggling," he continues, "like learning all these combinations of binary code, learning by doing them slowly, figuring out combinations. If I took a year off and just practiced, I wouldn't be close to mastering the thing."
The affable eight-stringer can't really explain why he took such a thorny route to instrumental prowess; he just sort of ended up here. "I don't know, events just pushed me in this direction," he says. "I liked the nifty stuff that Joe Pass and Tuck Andress played on six-strings. What I did evolved slowly but surely. I'm still evolving it. People ask me, "Don't you feel limited?' Yeah, if I was just a guitar player or just a bass player I could play much faster lines. But I can certainly do stuff that bass players and guitar players can't do. What I do changes the dynamic of the music a lot."
While Hunter, 33, has endeavored into a variety of genres, subgenres and microgenres during his decade-long, nine-album career, the one categorization that still seems to work is groove-jazz. Most of Hunter's compositions, including ones from his formidable current disc, Songs from the Analog Playground (Blue Note), rely on some permutation of funk/R&B rhythms. He also peppers his music with blues shuffles, ballads, bossa novas, New Orleans and Latin beats. As for beboppin', though, "When it comes to straight-ahead swing, I don't use that too often. I can't really find a way to use it to speak to my generation."
As a young child, Charlie Hunter was definitely a product of his mother's generation. "I didn't wear shoes until I was 8 years old," he told Downbeat magazine in November 2000," because my mom was into that crazy hippie thing with the bus — being on the road, stopping at communes, selling blood, playing spoons on the street for spare change, stealing newspapers."
The hippie bus stopped for good in Berkeley, Calif., where Charlie was exposed to the polyglot musical influences of the culture-rich area. Starting guitar at age 10, he soaked up everything from Parliament/ Funkadelic to the Dead Kennedys to Art Blakey. Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and blues legends like Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Buddy Guy made strong impressions. Instead of enrolling in Berkeley High's esteemed jazz program, he played hardscrabble bar gigs in soul, reggae and blues bands. He even led his own rockabilly outfit called the Grease Monkeys. In his late teens, he came down with a serious jazz jones after exposure to Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery.
But Hunter didn't don an Armani suit and join a grim-faced jazz combo. After having his first seven-string guitar custom-made for him in the late '80s, he sojourned to Europe, where he played on the streets of Paris and Zurich. After returning to the States, he gigged solo at clubs in San Francisco and Berkeley. He began to collaborate with poet/rapper Michael Franti, who recruited Hunter to play bass in his Disposable Heroes of the Hiphoprisy. For a year, the group opened for stadium shows for U2.
Hunter embarked on a more serious jazz course in '93, leaving the Heroes and forming his own trio. "That's where we learned to study the past and practice the present," he has said. He has a solid record deal with Blue Note, the road is where Hunter gets paid. Although he has a family and lives in Brooklyn, but the nomadic ways of his youth have translated into adulthood.
These days, Hunter is in the habit of changing instrumentation on virtually every album. Although the new disc features several tracks with guest vocalists (Mos Def, Kurt Elling) no singer will accompany his current quartet to Florida. The band includes drummer Johnny Didacovich, tenor saxophonist John Ellis and trombonist Josh Roseman. Although the combo will play select tunes from past Hunter albums, the set will not be a career retrospective. "I do mostly new stuff," he says. "It's nice to do stuff that people have heard, but I'd rather concentrate on (new) material that's exciting to me so that I'm not up there just being a human jukebox."
Contact Associate Editor Eric Snider at 813-248-8888, ext. 114, or snider@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2002.
