In a groove, not a rut

As experiments go, even Charlie Hunter is not so sure about this one.

Tonight for the third night of a six-night stand at Yoshi’s, the old-guard Oakland jazz club in its still-newish Jack London Square digs, there’s been unprecedented talk about removing the cabaret tables and chairs that usually ring the lip of the stage. That would be to accommodate guitarist Hunter’s cargo shorts- and Birkenstocks-wearing jam-band following. And it wouldn’t be a problem, figures Hunter, except that it’s going to integrate the young crowd he pulls in with his jazz-head audience, which will also be out in force for his annual week of shows on his old home turf. In other words, it would put the interpretive/free dancers and the backbeat head-bobbers all in one room -- sharing not just space, but also listening styles.

And that makes Hunter nervous. Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t to say that Hunter is not a risk-taker, or that he wouldn’t stick his neck out in the name of art or community, or just on a good-hunch impulse. He’s one, it’s important to know, who has made a multifaceted career out of swinging from straight-ahead jazz to funk, hip-hop and the genre-stretching world of jam bands -- hardly taking a breath.

For all of the jazz world’s teeth-gnashing about the future of the form and its next generation of listeners, Hunter has proved from gig to gig and record to record that the future is here -- and it’s often standing room only. So his experiments have not gone unnoticed, whether they involve unstitching a Nirvana tune and embellishing the whole cloth, or dreaming up a tricked-out, eight-string guitar-bass hybrid that might allow him to tackle bass and melody simultaneously -- just because he wonders what it might feel like.

For tonight’s set, he is planning to rework his song list to cut back on the more straight-ahead compositions and include more of his more groove-inflected material. To Hunter, it’s a test of whether what’s happening in his head and on disc translates to a real-world setting.

“I would love it to work. But I’m skeptical on a few levels because of the way the club is set up,” he explains over a Vietnamese feast -- deep-fried squid and earthy, sauteed pea sprouts -- at Le Cheval in downtown Oakland, a favorite hang from the old days. “People will be there to watch and eat and stuff, but you know, whatever, it could be a great thing. It could end up being very cool.”

He hasn’t quite convinced himself.

Although Hunter, long known as a musician’s musician, has been laying the groundwork for this amalgamation for some time -- hunting for source music, gathering adornments the world over, laying it all on top of infectious beats and unexpected arrangements and giving it a new-music bend, it is a lot to ponder. But what makes Hunter’s groove a revolution is that once on stage, it feels effortless. And no matter your background, your own musical proclivities, from jazz to funk to rock, you just let it happen.

The life of a nomad

Hunter knows that the process of merging styles and mixing sensibilities is not quick but evolutionary, a journey. At 35, he has spent a colorful, nomadic life not just on stage or on disc, but also on the road. As a child, he traveled the country, Partridge Family-style -- four years in a school bus in the ‘70s -- until his free-spirit mother settled down in Berkeley. As an adult, he’s led the consummate itinerant musician’s life, some years spending upward of 200 days traveling from gig to gig.

A transitory nature has marked his 10-year career. He’s gathered inspiration from a range of guitarists -- Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix and Tuck Andress -- and he’s spent time on stages and in studios with artists like Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, U2 and D’Angelo. He has twisted himself into quintets and duos, played with horns and without, been paired only with a drummer. What’s important to underscore is that the journey is never haphazard. He is neither dilettante nor trend-chaser. He has worked to deftly embroider every significant view-altering experience into his writing and musicianship.

It’s all there between the grooves: from the complex finger-work of Andress to the off-the-cuff fluidity of hip-hop. Mastering a finger-picking style that allows him to sustain a simple bass line and play with melody on top, Hunter has worked to develop the distinctive vocabulary of his instrument -- not as a guitar, or as a bass, but as something seamless and completely its own. That’s often noted even in the curmudgeonly world of straight-ahead jazz. “He’s charted a more expansive musical course developing an acute sense of lyricism,” Dan Ouellette wrote in Downbeat magazine, “as evidenced in his striking balladry and passionate romanticism.” And as critic Bill Milkowski pointed out in JazzTimes, “Hunter ... is a fine argument against the idea that nothing worthwhile came out of ‘acid jazz.’ ”

Dave Ellis, tenor sax player and longtime friend, thinks it’s even simpler: “He’s contributed Charlie Hunter. He’s always had this vision for what and how he was going to do a career.... If I didn’t know Charlie, I would be amazed by what he is capable of. But I know what went in to it.”

Hunter’s compositions and re-rendered pop tunes and standards have a lived-in/ worked-there quality about them. Traces of regions -- New Orleans, Memphis, Brazil -- linger like dirt under the fingernails. “I was calling it rhythm music for a while,” he says. “Because it was incorporating all this kind of rhythm music from all over the planet. But just feel like it’s jazz music, and really, ultimately that’s what it ends up being.”

Although his sultry eight-string, built by Berkeley-based guitar maker Ralph Novak, is a frequent conversation piece, it’s the intoxicating tone he coaxes out of it -- spooky, sexy, swampy -- sometimes all at the same time, that plays tricks with one’s perception. “Where’s the organ? Where’s the bassist?” the Hunter-uninitiated inevitably inquire, scanning the stage. But everything -- all the rhythm and color -- is coming from Hunter’s fingers, infusing the room.

Face to face, Hunter is a lot like his playing. Frank, yet warm. He’s passionate and earnest without tipping toward self-indulgence. He possesses a measured modesty that suggests he’s open to ideas and opinion but confident about his own. Nomadic stylistically -- as in life -- Hunter has, instead of trying to second-guess the music business’ moods, constructed a string of projects that force him to stretch. “If you are a superstar in corporate radio, you start communicating as a two-dimensional entity. Even if you’re a three-dimensional person,” he explains.Next month, Hunter will release “Right Now Move,” his first for Ropeadope Records (an eclectic subsidiary of Atlantic Records). It follows 2001’s “Songs From the Analog Playground,” (his final for Blue Note), which paired him, for the first time, with a diverse lineup of vocalists ranging from Mos Def to Norah Jones. “Move” places him back in a familiar quintet setting with John Ellis on tenor saxophone, Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Gregorie Maret on harmonicas and Derek Phillips on drums.

Hunter leaves Blue Note amicably. “It’s an organic thing. Things just progress and musicians, after seven or eight CDs, their vision changes,” says Tom Evered Sr., Blue Note’s vice president and general manager. “I’m just glad that he stayed long enough to get the CDs that we got. But we knew from the start that Charlie is a questing, forward-moving artist -- always looking for new people to play with and new ideas.... The best musicians just worry about playing the next best note. And that’s Charlie. He’s never cared about where he’s fit.”

Says Hunter: “It didn’t make sense to be part of a major corporation. I had one record left in the deal. They were in a situation where they had to pay me more money than they wanted to. So they came to me with like less than half of the money and I said, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do it.’ It was on principle.

“Ropeadope is really juiced. They are a small label, and for them, it’s not just another day in the office. You get back to that three-dimensional versus the two-dimensional, and I’m in a more three-dimensional situation right now.”

Sentimental journey

Hunter’s Oakland homecoming coincides with the opening of another life chapter. He’s in a sentimental mood as we slog through grim weather to the Lake Merritt Hotel, where the rest of the quintet is bunking.

The rain slaps so fiercely against the windows of his borrowed Toyota that it obscures the view of the office spaces and live/work lofts surrounding the downtown area. Those buildings and the upscale clientele that populates them were one of the primary reasons Hunter suddenly found himself priced out of the Bay Area five years ago.

“It’s changed a lot,” he says after he’s shaken his fist in mock outrage, not once, but twice at a “Stupid Useless Vehicle” that’s cut him off. Long gone are the late nights at the Elbo Room and the Up & Down Club in the City. “There were so many places to play. It was right before the dot-com thing in the early ‘90s. There was such a vibrant arts community and so many great musicians at a young age ready to play, and club owners who were willing to take chances . It ended up being a great thing, because we all had this grass-roots thing happen where young people, our age, were coming out to hear what was essentially jazz music.”

“We emphasized a funky style of improvisation, because Charlie was able to cover so many parts,” says Dave Ellis. “The songs were so memorable. You could sing them. But it’s been a problem from the start. You can dance to it. So you attract not your typical jazz audience, not your typical dance audience. He’s continued the idea of a dance pulse with an improvisational platform. This is one of the results of growing up in Berkeley -- diverse in all areas, all music encouraged.”

But it was a moment. Those 35 gigs a month -- “my comfy San Francisco lifestyle” -- suddenly dissolved. “My wife and I wanted to have a family. . [But] I couldn’t find a house within 50 miles of anywhere,” Hunter recalls. Bottom line: “The music scene was shrinking because the musicians had to leave.”

Hunter moved first to Brooklyn, no longer big man on campus. “You have to go to New York and get your butt kicked by all the greatest players in the world,” he says. “It really made a man of me. I had to make a lot of connections. In certain ways it was like starting from scratch. You just have to go and get yourself in the mix.”

Stepping into the fray

Hunter has always sunk both feet in deep. “Charlie’s incredibly driven,” says drummer Scott Amendola, who was part of T.J. Kirk, one of Hunter’s many rollicking Bay Area side projects. “He’s worked really hard . And always does, to improve and deepen the music inside of himself. Charlie is like about the celebration of music. That James Brown, Donny Hathaway, Aretha kind of joy. He has his introspective moments and the music can be deep ... but Charlie was and is totally into the groove.”

Downplaying process, Hunter takes a working man’s honest-day’s-work approach to his musicianship, rather than that of the misunderstood artiste.

Part of it is his “just get in the mix” attitude -- step into the fray and see how it goes. It’s a job you have to do. And it is the basis of a pep talk that Hunter has given himself this evening before striding out on stage. As the band members settle into their places, waitresses take turns around the packed performance space -- the chairs and tables cleared, after all near the stage. They serve pints and bottled beer to the standers; Cosmos and Chardonnays to the sitters. The requisite procession of gearheads strolls by the setup and remarks at his guitar’s size, the fanned frets. But as soon as Hunter, seated on a cushioned piano bench at the stage’s center, unleashes one of his trippy, gauzy solos, the focus is pulled in. The audience, standing or sitting, there for every turn in the road.

Hunter knows he’s an anomaly in a time of one-sentence descriptors. He figures it’s why he’ll never make the big bucks, why his exhausting touring career is so important. “The corporate music system is really trying to target their audiences, and they are kind of cross-ghettoizing it in a way, and it’s not really organic.”

For his part, Hunter will push his roots in the organic process of finding and building his audience, not pandering. “The people who I really admire in music are people who took a long time and found their voice -- John Coltrane, Donny Hathaway, Caetano Veloso, Stevie Wonder, they evolved,” reflects Hunter, after the set, settling backstage on a low, black sofa surrounded by his band, a few ghosts filtering in from the past. “Uplifting a community vibe and getting in the spirit of things [is] ... what I feel is the musician’s purpose. To give them another aspect of reality which is not their daily grind, another way that they can communicate with one another, and uplifts them.”

Hunter looks on as Amendola squeezes in from the cold, the reunion in full force. A starved Maret and Phillips wolf down micro greens and seared ahi as they trade lines from the film “GoodFellas.” “What? Am I here to amuse you?” Hunter chuckles on the sidelines, looking lighter, relieved. It went as he’d hoped: No one jostled, no one bent out of shape, everyone grooving as one, everyone amused.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The many moods of Charlie Hunter

A sampling of career-ranging Hunter recordings that place him in a range of settings -- duo, trio and with voices.

“Songs From the Analog Playground” (Blue Note, 2001) -- “Playground” is Hunter’s longtime wish. The album pairs him with an eclectic lineup of vocalists: Kurt Elling, Norah Jones, Mos Def and New Orleans-based soul singer Theryl De’Clouet, in a funky, half-stepping version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Mighty Mighty” and Jones’ haunting, languid cover of Nick Drake’s “Day Is Done.”

“Charlie Hunter” (Blue Note, 2000) -- Evidence of Hunter’s mastery of his eight-string shimmers brightly on this album, a collection of compositions penned by his influences (Donny Hathaway, Thelonious Monk) and originals deeply informed by them (“Al Green”). The guitar itself makes a few “costume changes” -- from organ to synth to plaintive wail.

“Duo” (Blue Note, 1999) -- Knee to knee with percussionist Leon Parker, Hunter shows off just how big (and how small) his guitar can be. Hunter’s fluid ability to fill space and build mood in a spare setting, backed by Parker’s swinging beats, shows how little it takes to whip up a good groove.

“Bing, Bing, Bing!” (Blue Note, 1995) -- This album showcases Hunter with one of his familiar San Francisco posses, Dave Ellis on tenor sax and Jay Lane on drums. The set weaves together jazz, funk and Hunter’s own blend of groove-inflected beats, and Hunter turns Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” into an entirely different invitation.