When I heard the Charlie Hunter Trio was playing Chicago’s City Winery over this past weekend, I expected something quite different. I was thinking I’d hear the usual fare of guitar, bass and drums – standard trio stuff. Meanwhile, I was sitting with someone that told me to expect guitar, sax and drums. Okay, sounds good. But what we got was guitar, VOCALS and drums. Interesting. I was also expecting something more in the Jazz vein, but I was wrong on that, too. I know what you’re thinking...Jazz has many forms. The Charlie Hunter Trio was a bit more like R&B - and heavily Blues flavored at times.
Hunter does a good job of making you not missing the fact there is no bass player. The first thing I noticed was he had bass notes coming out the guitar. It was a seven-string, but it seemed to get notes lower than that, so perhaps the bass string was tuned down a bit. Then I noticed he was running through two amps. One is a bass amp and one is for guitar. This made me look up his rig rundown today and I discovered that the bottom three strings on his guitar are bass strings, and the top four are guitar strings. There are two pickups on the instrument that allow splitting the bass and guitar strings into separate amps.
This allows a player to do different things. The first and most obvious is playing bass and guitar at the same time. The second is it allows someone to think like a piano player on the guitar. I have had the notion for quite some time that guitar represents the right hand of the piano and the bass the left. This allows a guitar player to do both. You don’t just pick a guitar like this up and start strumming chords on it. This is a bit of a hybrid machine and requires the technical facility to pull the whole thing off. Hunter did an amazing job in doing this. I can imagine at times he wished he had more fingers.
Dara Tucker was the vocalist and she really brought a lot of life to the show. In many ways, Hunter was her support act. Her voice was nothing less than amazing and was a perfect fit with the trio. I later found out she has music available on her own. Damon Grant was Hunter’s rhythmic accomplice on percussion. A very unconventional drummer. He used all different types of percussion to keep the beat alive.
This was not the band I was expecting to see, which taught me a few things. First, keep an open mind about how bands are constructed. Second, that the guitar can be more than just a guitar. In the hands of Hunter, it was much more. I was not disappointed last night one bit. Great show, and it is one I highly recommend, and should they come back – no better place to check them out than City Winery Chicago.
