Where Coltrane Meets Cobain

The crowd at Santa Monica’s Alligator Lounge on a recent Friday night looked nothing like the usual jazz audience. Long hair, flannel shirts, shaved heads and Kurt Cobain-style facial hair dominated a sold-out assemblage of fans and the curious that had gathered in the lowbrow space known for presenting the hip and experimental to hear Bay Area guitarist Charlie Hunter.

Sporting a neatly trimmed beard, baggy jeans, a T-shirt and an unusual eight-string guitar, Hunter promised them that his quartet was there to “put the jazz back into jazz.”

What he meant by that was soon apparent. Hunter, who plays both bass and lead on his instrument, drummer Scott Amendola and saxophonists Calder Spanier and Kenny Brook began to move through a variety of grooves and moods, all based on the familiar themes and improvisation template of jazz. Around these themes, the foursome generated passages of spontaneous interplay and long, spirited improvisations. Rhythm was central.

Before the evening was over, Hunter had refashioned three Bob Marley tunes in walk, ballad and funk rhythms. He turned the Beatles’ “Fixing a Hole” from the “Sgt. Pepper” album into a driving groove anthem. He introduced the varied riffs of a mythical dance craze--the Shango--that he invented for a forthcoming album. But calls from the youthfully hip club-goers for Hunter’s cover of Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” heard on his first Blue Note recording, went unanswered.

After the show, there was much talk about what to call Hunter’s brand of instrumental music. Terms including “acid jazz,” “grunge jazz” and “avant-rock jazz” were considered. While each term had its detractors, everyone agreed that the music was, indeed, jazz.

But it’s not the jazz of your father’s generation. Hunter and company are introducing a new, mostly pre-30-year-old audience to the joys of improvised music by developing their sound around a rock, soul and roots music background, then taking it somewhere fresh.

Hunter is the most visible figure of this new jazz-pop hybrid, a loose family that includes New York-based keyboard combo Medeski, Martin and Wood, contemporary ensemble Lost Tribe and a host of serious acid jazz groups, including the Broun Felinis.

Based on the improvisational spirit of jazz and the rhythmic flesh of funk and soul, this music’s nearest relations include eclectic guitarists Bill Frisell and David Torn, the new-thing jazz ensembles of percussionists Bob Moses and Bobby Previte as well as such funk-rock and dance-jam bands as Phish.

But there’s jazz in the movement’s family tree as well. Traces of Jimmy Smith, Big John Patton and Larry Young’s R&B-fired; organ trios as well as the jazz-funk school led by pianist Horace Silver, trumpeter Lee Morgan and others can be heard. The fusion revolution of the early ‘70s is the movement’s half brother gone bad.

“We know the lineage of jazz,” says Hunter, 28, “and we’re completely in debt to it. We’ve built the foundation of our music on John Coltrane, on Charlie Parker, on Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, all the way back through Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton to the turn of the century. We want people to know that this is the music that means the most to us.

“But we also want our audience to know that we’re from the twentysomething generation, that we share the same experiences as a lot of people our age. That’s what we want to communicate; that’s what inspires us.”

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Chris Douridas, the host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic” on KCRW-FM (89.9), says that groups like Hunter’s and Medeski, Martin and Wood are rooted in the classics, “but they disguise it in such a way that it has a freshness and originality that a younger audience can tap into and call their own. They attract people from pop and alternative rock that wouldn’t necessarily come across [jazz organist] Jimmy Smith.”

“[Hunter’s] playing to a Lollapalooza crowd,” says one of the Alligator crowd’s few members over 40, a longtime rock roadie and jazz fan, “but he’s really got that instrumental thing happening.”

Indeed, Hunter’s group has appeared on the Lollapalooza alternative stage as well as in clubs around the nation. While factions of the jazz audience have embraced his music, most of his following has been built mostly from raids on the alternative rock audience.

His first album for Blue Note, “Bing, Bing, Bing!” released last June, has shipped 50,000 units, a remarkable figure considering that many established jazz artists often sell only 15,000 to 25,000 units. Blue Note’s director of sales, Saul Shapiro, attributes this success to the support of college-based FM stations and Hunter’s commitment to frequent touring. (The guitarist is also the moving force behind the jazz-and-soul tribute band T.J. Kirk that records for Warner Bros.)

At the same time, Hunter is also drawing fans from the world of jazz who wouldn’t know Primus from Tori Amos. Although some mainstream critics have questioned Hunter’s direction, he attracts the kind of followers who buy fellow guitarist John Scofield’s albums, admire the hip-hop leanings of saxophonist Steve Coleman or who simply like the grooves of organist Jimmy McGriff.

But the jazz audience, unlike the college set, may have a hard time finding him. Although he toured heavily last year, playing alternative clubs and on college campuses, Hunter played only one major jazz room in 1995.

“Jazz clubs don’t know what to make of him,” says Joe Brauner of the Agency for the Performing Arts Inc., who books Hunter’s dates. “And because of high cover and drink charges, they can be very exclusionary toward Charlie’s young audience, something he wants to avoid.”

Exposure to the jazz audience comes at festivals, where Hunter often appears side by side with more traditional acts, or at larger venues that present a variety of pop, jazz and blues artists. He appeared at New York’s JVC Festival last summer on a bill with young-lion saxophonist James Carter and has a host of festival appearances scheduled for this summer in the U.S., Canada and Europe (he’s booked into a number of European jazz clubs as well). Hunter was seen twice at L.A.’s House of Blues last year.

What Hunter is doing is not that different from what Miles Davis did when he released “Bitches Brew” in 1969 and started playing rock venues such as Bill Graham’s Fillmore: that is, to develop a following from outside the traditional jazz audience with a format that’s relevant to a younger, pop-oriented audience.

Hunter’s claim that he is a product of the pop music he heard growing up is echoed by Medeski, Martin and Wood keyboardist John Medeski. His gritty organ-electric piano, bass and percussion trio has released three well-received recordings and was heard on the soundtrack to “Get Shorty.”

“What we’re doing is the same thing that jazz was doing in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” he says by telephone from a tour stop in Boulder, Colo. “We’re playing improvised music related to the pop music of the day. We take the groove and the dance music we grew up with and create something that has a little more depth to it.”

The trio’s first album, an acoustic date from 1992, featured Medeski’s Booker T.-meets-Cecil Taylor pianisms on originals as well as remakes of Wayne Shorter and Duke Ellington tunes. The group’s last two Gramavision albums have taken a harder tack, with low-tech electronic keyboards grooving above street beats and emphatic upright-bass lines.

Medeski, Martin and Wood has carved out a niche of support in the same manner as Hunter, through college radio play and incessant touring (they’ve even appeared on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show). The trio also played to a packed house at the Alligator last month, preceded by a live-broadcast performance aired on KCRW-FM.

“When we first hit the road, nobody knew who we were,” says Medeski, 30, who has also worked with adventurous saxophonist John Zorn and John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards. “In a certain way, we’re doing the same thing as Charlie. We have that link of improvisational music, but we’re making it relevant to what’s going on today. That’s why the kids are digging it.”

Like Medeski, Hunter is dismissive of being categorized generally. And each is adamantly against being branded as a player of acid jazz, the nebulous label that has come to signify everything from camp covers of jazz standards to drum machine-paced dance music. Hunter dislikes the term so much that he has come up with his own category for what he does: “antacid jazz.”

“I don’t really know what acid jazz is,” he says. “Sometimes the press needs a term to advertise something. We sometimes get resistance from mainstream [jazz] critics who label us [acid jazz]. What we play is accessible but not as accessible as all that.”

The name of Hunter’s second band with Amendola and fellow guitarists Will Bernard and John Schott explains his philosophy as well as anything. T.J. Kirk plays exclusively the music of its namesakes: Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Their unusual take makes familiar tunes like Brown’s “Cold Sweat” only faintly resemble themselves.

“These are our champions,” Hunter says. “We play all these crazy, wacky arrangements of their music, but when you go back and listen to the originals, it’s like we really didn’t need to change anything. That music is simply so amazing and vital.”

Most of all, Hunter admires Kirk, the late saxophonist who often played several horns at once, occasionally while lying on his back.

“Roland Kirk is my idol,” Hunter says. “Of all the people in music, I model my shtick after him. He really did outrageous things, and I want to follow a similar path.”

Hunter, who spends the little time he’s not on tour tinkering with his 1966 Ford Mustang, fits the mold, if not the look, of the musical revolutionary. He graduated from the same Berkeley High School whose music program produced saxophonist Joshua Redman (who attended at the same time as Hunter) and pianist Benny Green.

Yet Hunter didn’t participate in the school’s prestigious music program (“I really wasn’t an institutional-type person--I had to go out and do my own thing”), but he did have an all-consuming appetite for music.

“I was into everything at that point--blues, rockabilly, funk and soul,” he says. But it wasn’t until he was 18 that he discovered jazz.

“My friends said, ‘You got to get into jazz, you’ve got to listen to Weather Report.’ And I thought, ‘This is fusion. I’m not really into that.’ So then somebody told me I should listen to Wes Montgomery, but the album I got was one of those with strings, and I was totally turned off. Finally, somebody said, ‘You need to check out Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian and John Coltrane,’ and it was like boom! I was instantly turned on. Their total sound and the reality of their playing just cut through everything. I suddenly wanted to play like that.”

Hunter spent three summers in Europe, playing guitar for tips on the streets of Paris and Zurich, Switzerland, before he began to desire a wider-toned instrument. When the traditional seven-string guitar fell short of his expectations, he had the unusual eight-string he now uses built by Bay Area designer Ralph Novak. He’s been playing it for almost four years.

The guitarist spent the late ‘80s with politically minded rap band Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy but found the touring a drag and the music less than satisfying. His trio, which has since become a quartet with the addition of the second saxophone, began playing San Francisco’s Up and Down Club in 1992. Prawn Song Records released his self-titled first album in 1994, and it was followed a year later by his first release for Blue Note. His second Blue Note recording--”Ready . . . Set . . . Shango!”--is set for release in June.

Hunter says his quartet is his main push. “The T.J. Kirk thing is just a side project. We were doing it just for fun, and the joke was on us when somebody signed us to a record contract.” (T.J. Kirk’s second album for Warner Bros. is scheduled to be recorded later this month. Also this month, the quartet is set to record a third Blue Note album of the music of reggae legend Marley.)

But Hunter says he is serious about expanding his audience’s appreciation of his heroes and turning as many of his contemporaries on to jazz as possible.

“I hope that’s what happens,” he says before rushing off to another show. “People like Roland Kirk and Thelonious Monk need to be household names because they made such important contributions to American culture.”

And now, in the jazz music of Charlie Hunter, they rock.

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The Charlie Hunter Quartet plays Friday at the Galaxy Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana, 8 p.m.; (714) 957-1133. Also May 26 at Playboy Jazz at the Old Pasadena Summer Fest, Central Park, Fair Oaks Avenue at Del Mar Avenue, Pasadena, about 5 p.m. Free. (818) 797-6803.

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Hear Charlie Hunter

* To hear excerpts from the album “Bing, Bing, Bing!” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5722.

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