Eight-String Wonder

Charlie Hunter talks about life on the road, his recording career with Blue Note, and the difficulties of playing jazz for a pop-music audience. He’ll perform with his quintet at Conduit in Trenton Feb. 7.

By: Daniel Shearer

"Charlie
Charlie Hunter has been making his mark on the jazz scene since the early ’90s.


   Among musicians, Charlie Hunter inspires the kind of reverence reserved for individuals with jaw-dropping talent. The only reason his name isn’t more widely known — and make no mistake, he is famous — seems to be due to the fact that his primary medium is jazz, a style that rarely attracts much attention when it comes to selling records.
   Performing on an eight-string instrument of his own design, an electric guitar-bass hybrid, Mr. Hunter has been wowing audiences since the early ’90s with his uncanny ability to juggle bass lines and melody. That’s no small accomplishment, considering the complexity of the rhythms and harmonies involved.
   Following his debut album as a band leader, recorded in 1994 for Prawn Song Records, a label founded by Primus bassist Les Claypool, Mr. Hunter signed with Blue Note and has since released seven albums with the jazz imprint, among them, Tales from the Analog Playground in 2001, which included vocal appearances from rapper Mos Def and Blue Note recording artists Kurt Elling and Norah Jones.
   Although Mr. Hunter has since parted ways with Blue Note, he and his quintet have been busy with January performances at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan. On Feb. 7, the Charlie Hunter Quintet will perform at Conduit in Trenton, and, later in the month, a series of Wednesday-night shows at the House of Blues in Boston. The band recently spent time in the studio with producer Scott Harding — known for his work with the post-bop fusion combo Medeski, Martin and Wood — which led to Mr. Hunter’s latest CD, Right Now Move, slated for release in April on Ropadope Records.
   Mr. Hunter spoke with TimeOFF in a phone interview from his home in Montclair, during a time when the guitarist and his wife find themselves busy with "a serious kid time of adjustment" weeks after the birth of their second son. A native of Berkeley, Calif., Mr. Hunter moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., from the West Coast in 1998, then relocated to the ‘burbs to raise a family. His home is only a short drive from the stages of the Big Apple.
TimeOFF Looking back on 10 years of touring and making records, and a couple of hundred thousand miles on the road (Mr. Hunter laughs), has the music business been what you expected?
Charlie Hunter Uh, yeah. I guess. It’s also changed a lot since I’ve been in it, you know.
TO How so?
CH Well, I think that I got in at the very tail end of the music business that had been operating the exact same way since the 1950s, where, although the role was very much more diminished, you could still get a record deal and they would put some publicity behind you and it would actually do something for you. Like, my first two records on Blue Note pretty much — and also the fact that I was out there on the road, hard, hard, hard touring — really kind of started my career at a time when musically I probably wasn’t even remotely ready. Whereas today, they’re not really in the business anymore of developing artists, especially instrumental, you know. And if you use the j-word, you can just forget it all together.
TO J-word?
CH Jazz (laughs). So you have these kids who are incredible musicians, and they’re gonna have to figure out new ways of finding their audience because that kind of corporate way is no longer really a viable option. ‘Cause they’re not really in the business of doing that anymore. They’re in the business of making platinum records, and that’s about all they’re really interested in.
TO I’m surprised to hear you say you were unprepared. I mean, you had Joe Satriani as a teacher for a long time. That’s pretty good company to be keeping, and you were cutting your teeth on some serious jazz. You’ve been a great musician for a while.
CH Well, thanks. But I really wasn’t then. When you get the chance you gotta take it.

"Charlie
Charlie Hunter (left) with his eight-string instrument, a guitar-bass hybrid of his own design.


TO You’ve done a fair amount of touring with pop acts, John Mayer for one. Do you see yourself picking up some of his audience?
CH Oh no way, not in a million years. There’s nothing we could do to our music to make his audience be interested in it, (laughs) which we discovered the hard way being out there on the road with him for two weeks. He’s a nice guy, and he liked my music when he was very young. I guess he’s still pretty dang young, but he dug my guitar playing, so he had us on the bill. We opened two weeks for him, but it was just hard. It showed me that his audience is the audience really that is buying records, and those are like 14-, 16-year-old girls essentially, and there’s nothing I can play that a 14-year-old girl would be interested in.
TO So the audience wasn’t into it.
CH Not really. They saw a bunch of guys on stage that literally were old enough to be their dad, you know. A lot of ’em weren’t even old enough to baby-sit for me (laughs). I’m really glad that (Mayer) gave me that chance, and I feel like when you’re doing this kind of music that doesn’t have a very wide audience, when you get a chance, you have to take it. You just have to put your money where your mouth is.
TO Have you mainly been doing solo bookings as the Charlie Hunter Quintet or have you been performing with other acts?
CH Mostly just our own shows.
TO So who is your audience?
CH It’s a pretty good cross section of people, actually. And it also depends on the area we’re playing in. I’d have to say there’s a lot of guitar people there.
TO Well, when you play in Boston at the House of Blues, you’re gonna get students from Berklee College of Music.
CH You’re gonna get Berklee students, but you’re also gonna get students from the rest of the colleges. Lots of different music folks. Some people who are like, I don’t know what they call jam-band crowds, neo-hippies I guess, you’d have like maybe 10 to 20 percent of the audience might be those guys. But not the ones that like are new to it. These are guys who have heard all those bands and have kind of graduated from it to being interested in something a little more involved. It’s good. It’s not always a pirate ship, either. There’s a lot of women there at the gigs, which is nice.
TO From your perspective, do jazz fans seem more interested in seeing live music or buying records?
CH Live music, definitely.
TO Why is that? After all, jazz is spontaneous music…
CH That’s what it is. So much of it has to do with the performance. They’ve spent so much time listening to stuff on MTV, stuff that’s kind of canned, formatted and all that stuff. And when they come to our gigs, I feel like they’re coming there because they’ve had enough of that and they want to have a three-dimensional musical experience.
TO You play a beautiful instrument by the way. Does it have a name?
CH Yeah, the eight-string guitar.

"Charlie
"My attitude is the electric instrument really is an acoustic instrument, and if it doesn’t sound good before you plug in, it’s not gonna sound any better when you do plug in," Mr. Hunter says.


TO Is it tuned like a regular guitar?
CH In some aspects. It’s tuned like the lower three strings of a bass, E, A, D, and the higher five strings of a guitar, A, D, G, B and E.
TO The frets are different from a normal guitar, diagonal instead of straight, which I guess is because bass strings require more distance between the frets. It’s a larger string.
CH Exactly. You got it.
TO Was it tough to learn to play? You would finger chords differently.
CH Um, yes and no. Certain areas are easier to get your hands into, and other areas are harder to get your hands into. It looks more daunting when you’re looking straight at it than when you’re actually playing it.
TO The advantage, of course, is a unique sound. You can have a walking bass line and pick out chords and/or melodies on top of that. But are there any disadvantages?
CH There’s advantages and disadvantages to everything. The disadvantage is that it’s so difficult, because everything you’re dealing with, at least the way I play it, you’re dealing with counterpoint, rhythmic, melodic, harmonic counterpoint. Everything you learn takes so long. Just the technical aspects of the instrument are so difficult that my evolution musically has been a lot slower than my colleagues, just because it takes me so long to get anything happening on it.
TO What were some of the first songs that you came up with that you feel really started to realize the capabilities of the instrument?
CH I don’t think it had anything to do with songs. You just try to learn different changes and all kinds of different combinations between bass and guitar stuff. Whatever tune you’re playing just happens to be what you’re playing. Back in the Bay Area, I had lots of straight-ahead jazz gigs where we’d just play tunes. I just have to learn how to operate within those confines, and then just transcribing lot of organ players who do left-hand bass, or foot-pedal bass, and try to get that into my thing as well. Now I’m still just trying to learn different and better, easier ways of doing it.
TO What were you doing when you came up with the idea of putting a bass and a guitar on the same neck?
CH It kind of organically came out of guitar players who were already doing that on six-string guitar, like Joe Pass and Tuck Andress, Baden Powell, people who had a lot of bass movement and counterpoint movement going on. It just kind of came out of my interest in those kinds of guitar players, and then eventually I played a lot of bass, and then it just slowly developed. I thought, "Well, I might as well try this and see what happens."
TO How much of the sound comes from the instrument itself, and how much from the equipment that you plug into?
CH My attitude is the electric instrument really is an acoustic instrument, and if it doesn’t sound good before you plug in, it’s not gonna sound any better when you do plug in. I would have to say the vast majority of it comes from the hands and the instrument.
TO A lot of people say they hear a Hammond organ-type sound coming out of your instrument.
CH Yeah, that’s the thing, like a Leslie speaker. If I’m in the studio, I’ll use a real Leslie speaker.
TO The rotating kind.
CH Yeah, and if not, I’ll use this thing called a Rotosphere. Really, it’s an analog device and it does a great job of simulating a Leslie speaker.

"Cover
Cover of Charlie Hunter’s CD, "Songs from the Analog Playground."


TO What was it that got you really excited about jazz?
CH It’s so hard to say, because there’s so much material that I’ve checked out that it’s really difficult to say with any authority like there’s any single one thing, because there isn’t. It’s just making that journey from checking out some of the earliest stuff relating to guitar, Lonnie Johnson, Carl Kress and stuff like that.
   Then Django Reinhardt, then dealing with Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, you know, Grant Green and Joe Pass. And that’s just the guitar players, not to mention all the be-bop music, Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie, then Thelonious Monk and Coltrane and Mingus. It goes on and on and on, and that’s just the jazz stuff. There’s so much other stuff. Roland Kirk is a big influence as well, not that I transcribed much of his solos or anything, but just his concept in the way that he tried to take something that wasn’t an existing thing and do some really different stuff with it.
TO But you transcribed a lot of music by the people you rattled off.
CH Definitely.
TO You’re a theory geek.
CH Uh, not too much, but you have to learn. You have to be able hang with these bad-ass players that I’m lucky enough to play with.
TO I was kind of surprised listening to your last CD, Songs from the Analog Playground, by the fact that you took a back seat at times to Mos Def and Norah Jones. Had you been wanting to do an album with vocals for a while?
CH Yeah, and I knew that was gonna be my last record for Blue Note and probably would be the last chance I would ever have to have enough of a budget to hire those kinds of people to be on a record. It was fun. I just felt more on that record, more of like the producer and the arranger than the guitar player. The guitar playing definitely took a back seat. That’s not a guitar-playing record. That’s definitely more of like a rhythm-section kind of record for me.
TO Your upcoming album, Right Now Move, brings you to Ropadope.
CH They’re a label out of New York City. They have a lot of cool acts and they’re real excited about what we’re doing. I thought it would be fun to do a record with them.
TO What did Scott Harding bring to the table when you went into the studio with him?
CH Oh, it was fun because it was much different than usual. It had this real raw, kind of not very much matriculated into the jazz world kind of thing. I liked what we got in the record, considering that we pretty much recorded it in one day.
TO I liked how on the new record you have an instrumental version of "Desert Way," from Analog Playground.
CH I just thought it worked really well with the quintet, all those crazy harmonies. We originally called it "Winky," then Kurt Elling wrote those lyrics and he called it "Desert Way."
TO What are you going to be playing at Conduit?
CH A lot of the music from the new record, and then a few other little ditties, just a bunch of new stuff we’ve got going on. We’re not gonna have Gregoire (Maret), the harmonica player (on Mr. Hunter’s upcoming CD) because he’s gonna be out on the road with, I think, Ravi Coltrane. So we have all the people except for Gregoire (tenor saxophonist John Ellis, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes and drummer Derek Phillips). We’re gonna have Sam Newsome on soprano sax replacing Gregoire for that gig. He’s killin’. He’s a great player from New York. Really phenomenal.
The Charlie Hunter Quartet performs at Conduit, 439 S. Broad St., Trenton, Feb. 7, 8 p.m. Wingdam opens. Tickets cost $15. All-ages show. For information, call (609) 656-1199. On the Web: www.conduitmusic.com. Charlie Hunter on the Web: www.charliehunter.com