Charlie Hunter: Seven-String Samurai

Jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter is not a musician who's comfortable resting on his laurels. With nearly twenty albums under his belt and no sign of stopping in sight, Hunter continues to wow audiences with the wizardry of his seven-string guitar technique, by which he lays down bass grooves and simultaneously wings guitar solos along the frets with flawless finesse. This has earned him a reputation as an intrepid musician and an incredible showman who draws packed crowds into jazz clubs across the U.S. and overseas to see his magic at work. But the razzle dazzle of his unique virtuosity is second fiddle to the music itself. His albums have run the gamut from blues to bebop, free jazz to funk fusion, with Hunter constantly experimenting with new sounds and rhythmic arcs, all the while perfecting that pocket counterpoint between the guitar and bass.

Hunter recently completed a month-long residency at Rose Live Music in Brooklyn, where he was playing a duo series with veteran musicians from his past projects, such as drummer Tony Mason. There, he chatted at length about music culture, his latest album Baboon Strength (Spire, 2008), family life in Montclair NJ, the current jazz scene, and his personal journey from blues guitarist to European street musician to hybrid guitar/bass phenomenon.

All About Jazz: It seems with every album you produce, you're always working with new sounds and new styles, constantly trying to push the music forward...

Charlie Hunter: Yeah, I'm always thinking, "This is what I'm interested in now, how do I put this into my bag and mess with it? How I can work something out with this?"

AAJ: And you'll be recording a new studio album soon, right? What's your focus when you go into the studio? Are you actively composing or just walking in there to see what you and the musicians can come up with?

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Clint Eastwood Presents Johnny Mercer: The Dream's On Me

Johnny Mercer
Clint Eastwood Presents Johnny Mercer: The Dream's On Me
TCM (2009)

Film director Clint Eastwood's love of jazz and American popular song is far from a secret, especially following his feature-length biopic about alto saxophonist Charlie Parker (Bird, 1988), during which the ever restless Eastwood got the idea to produce a feature-length film about pianist Thelonious Monk, released somewhat later during the same year as Straight No Chaser. Hence, it should surprise few that Eastwood will introduce viewers to a month-long 100th birthday celebration of American lyricist Johnny Mercer on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), beginning with Eastwood Presents Johnny Mercer: The Dream's On Me, which will be telecast in the U.S. on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 with a repeat on Wednesday, November 18. Throughout the month of November, when Mercer would have been 100, Wednesdays on TCM will be devoted to classic Hollywood films with lyrics penned and, in some instances, performed by Mercer, who not only wrote but sang more hit songs than virtually any other American songwriter.

The Eastwood opener is admittedly a "teaser," a mosaic of familiar songs and faces that nevertheless succeeds in giving viewers, regardless of their degree of familiarity with Mercer, plenty of motivation to delve into his considerable body of work. (The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, published by Knopf earlier in 2009, must surely rank among the thickest, heaviest tomes ever produced.) While Mercer's is a familiar voice and face to anyone who remembers the popular music of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later work with singers Bobby Darin, Andy Williams and Barry Manilow (who set his elegiac lyric "When October Goes" to music before releasing a recorded performance posthumously), it comes as a surprise to even many of his steadfast admirers to learn that it was Mercer who founded Capitol records, which would go on to become one of the several most important recording companies of the latter half of the 20th century.

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ECM at 40: Enjoy Jazz Festival

ECM at 40. It's hard to believe that a record label responsible for stretching the boundaries of modern music has survived the various crises that have threatened and, in some cases, decimated so many others. With Enjoy Jazz's "The Blue Sound: 40 Years of ECM" festival-within-a-festival, it's as good a time as any to take stock of where the label has been, where it is, and where's it's going.

Mannheim Castle, Venue for "The Blue Sound: 40 Years of ECM"

In a press conference that took place prior to the first evening's concerts, label head/producer Manfred Eicher spoke of how the label has, indeed, survived such perceived crises as the oil crisis in the late 1970s which, as he dryly put it, "resulted in vinyl as thin as pizza crust." Just as much a threat was the industry's move to CD format, forcing the label to rethink its design approach to accommodate a smaller footprint. And as music seems, at the same time, to be moving away from hard media to digital downloads and returning to vinyl, ECM continues to stand strong with the vision that has not only made it a remarkable innovator, but a rare survivor. There simply is no other independent label in jazz and beyond that has remained so for so long, and it's Eicher's singular vision of sonic transparency and musical cross-pollination that, as he explained, is all about instinct--the intuition that has kept the label at the forefront of modern music--no longer jazz, no longer classical, but simply music.

Eicher talked about the increasingly blurred line between the label's regular series (once considered the "jazz" side) and the New Series line (the "classical" side), and how musicians are surprisingly well-informed about music beyond their apparent purview. He talked of attending a Radiohead concert and being invited backstage, where he ended up in a discussion about Beethoven with the group's bassist, Colin Greenwood. "It was a surprise," Eicher said," but then again it shouldn't have been." It was a sentiment mirrored by Wolfgang Sandner--a respected German journalist who is co-curating the ECM festival with Enjoy Jazz Festival director Rainer Kern and journalist Hans-Jürgen Linke--who talked of how classical composer György Ligeti was informed by jazz, and how violinist Thomas Zehetmair, scheduled for a duo performance with violist Ruth Killius later that evening, takes considerable improvisational liberties with the music of Paganini on his most recent recording, Paganini: 24 Capricci (ECM, 2009).

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Ben Neill: Starting a Dub War

To say that Ben Neill plays the trumpet--the instrument of such jazz legends as Miles Davis and Clifford Brown--is an epic understatement. "I think electronica is like a new form of jazz--it's an instrumental form of music that plays out in popular culture but has musical ideas that go beyond the expectations of pop music," says Neill, a student of the electro-acoustic innovations of Robert Moog and minimalist aesthetic of LaMonte Young. Neill specifically plays the mutantrumpet, a self-designed instrument that he's been slowly perfecting since the mid 1980s. His latest album, Night Science (Thirsty Ear, 2009), is a heady, dark alchemy of improv and electronica. No surprise, then, that the record is the latest release on Thirsty Ear Records' Blue Series.

The brainchild of Thirsty Ear head Peter Gordon, The Blue Series has long sought to find a point where the electronic manipulation of sound (both in post-production and on the spot) and the live interaction of seasoned jazz musicians become blurred, all but insignificant. Night Science, in many ways, is the pinnacle of the Blue Series' raison d'etre. Sans turntables, Neill is DJ-cum-jazz artist. Or perhaps vice versa.

Neill began work on Night Science in late 2007. "The process of the recording happened on several levels simultaneously," Neill explains. "The first layer was developing beats and bass lines in Logic Pro, then exporting those elements to Ableton Live so I could improvise with them from the mutantrumpet.

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1959: The Year Classic Albums Were Born

When the year 1959 began, there were only 48 states. Alaska and Hawaii would became part of the United States during that annum, the third year of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's second term. It was the year Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba and took a goodwill tour of the U.S., two months after an interview with Edward R. Murrow on CBS television.

Mattel toy company launched the Barbie doll. In professional basketball, theCeltics beat the Lakers for the NBA crown--but it was the Minneapolis Lakers.

Bob Dylan, (then Robert Zimmerman), graduating from Hibbing High School in Minnesota might have gone that year to see the epic motion picture "Ben Hur" or the comedy "Some Like It Hot" that made cross dressing acceptable under certain circumstances--especially if it involved wooing Marilyn Monroe. Or he might have tuned in television shows like "Bonanza" and "The Twilight Zone," both premiering in 1959.

In music, the Grammy Awards were created and debuted. And on the darker side, a chartered plane transporting musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson crashed in an Iowa snowstorm, killing them and the pilot, a tragedy later termed "the day the music died" in Don McLean's song, "American Pie." Famed New York disc jockey Allan Freed at WABC Radio refused to sign a statement saying he never accepted payola--payment for getting an artist's records on the air--and was fired.

But in jazz, there was no such bad news (if one discounts the increasing popularity of rock n' roll music that was pushing jazz toward the fringes of popularity). The year 1959, for whatever reason, whatever alignment of the planets or whim of the Fates, was a glorious year.

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Bobby Bradford: Self-Determination in the Great Basin

Born in Cleveland, Mississippi in 1934 and raised between Dallas and Los Angeles, trumpeter Bobby Bradford began playing with Ornette Coleman in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and replaced Don Cherry in an unrecorded Coleman quartet during the early 1960s. However, the most significant partnership in Bradford's musical life was with the clarinetist and composer John Carter (1928-1991), with whom he worked and recorded from 1969 into the 1980s a very different brand of free-bop. Now a professor at Pomona College, Bradford continues to lead his Mo'Tet and is being celebrated at the 2009 Festival of the New Trumpet in New York.

All About Jazz: Could you talk a bit about who you're working with presently?

Bobby Bradford: I have a group called the Mo'tet, and for a while we were working about once a month in this Italian restaurant in Sierra Madre, but we could play whatever we wanted--no restaurant music or anything. That band has William Jeffrey on drums; Roberto Miranda on bass; I use Don Preston on piano and on saxophone Chuck Manning; Ken Rosser on guitar; and Michael Vladtkovitch on trombone.

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How to Listen to Jazz

After surviving a near-fatal marriage and returning once again to the Original Geniusdome, the site of some of my best work (remember that really funny thing I wrote about jazz that time?), I recently took some time to reflect upon my contributions to Our Music. As the Dean of American Jazz Humorists©®, I have long considered it my responsibility both to demystify some of the more esoteric aspects of jazz and to loosen the death grip of the zealot so that the music can breathe. And if by fulfilling these duties, I should somehow end up rich and famous, romantically linked to unspeakably hot actresses like Christina Hendricks and/or Scarlett Johansson and given a lifetime supply of beer by the Anheuser-Busch corporation for my work promoting the consumption of their product by tireless example, well, then, so be it.

But in the process of sifting through my collected works, a glaring oversight was pointed out to me by my parakeet/bodyguard Luca Brasi. "Yes, we get it, {{Wynton Marsalis = 1914}} has a very round head. But where in all this do you give JazzNoobs a lesson in how to listen to this sometimes daunting music?" he said, making a valid point for someone who spends a significant portion of his day chirping at his own reflection in a mirror.

Sure enough, in eight years of occupying my mantle here at AAJ, I had not once addressed the very basic issue that is probably most responsible for keeping people from making a more dedicated foray into the seemingly impenetrable depths of Our Music that lie beyond the safety and comfort of the familiar kind of jazz one hears on those 1970's TV shows where people in polyester bell-bottoms and crocheted sweater-vests are supposed to be hip.

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All About Jazz Launches New Photo Gallery

The new All About Jazz Photo Gallery is live! If you're a professional photographer, a musician or a fan who takes pictures at concerts or festivals, upload your photos to AAJ and share them with the largest jazz community online. Portrait/publicity photos, concert photos, archived photos and candid photos are all welcome. You can upload paintings and illustrations too.

Tag your photos, add descriptions and associate them with musicians, venues, festivals and yourself at AAJ. You can upload 1, 10, 100... 500 photos at a time. It's easy and it's fast.Our new gallery works a little like Flickr, but is fully integrated with the All About Jazz website.Upload your jazz photos to AAJ today!

Photo Credit
Sue Storey