Interview with Charlie Hunter

Guitarist Charlie Hunter and drummer Scott Amendola will perform July 6 at the 2013 Iowa City Jazz Festival. KCCK's Gordon Paulsen interviewed Hunter about the show and his career.

You can hear Hunter’s music regularly on KCCK at www.kcck.org. Or, for a consistent dose of music from artists appearing at the Jazz Festival, check out the Iowa City Jazz Fest channel at www.iowachannel.org. It's a 24-7 music feed of jazz fest artists.

Interviews with Hunter and the other headliners air regularly on the Jazz Fest Channel. Transcripts will also be posted here.

I’m Gordon Paulson and on the phone with me from New Jersey is guitar wizard, composer, and group leader Charlie Hunter who will be returning to Eastern Iowa to perform at the Iowa City Jazz Festival on Saturday, July 6th. He’ll be taking the mainstage at 4 pm in downtown Iowa City. Charlie, you’ve played the festival in the past, it’s been a number of years ago, and you’ve also played quite recently here in Eastern Iowa at CSPS. So you are certainly not unfamiliar to Iowa listeners, but we’re glad to have you back at the Iowa City Jazz Festival.

CHARLIE: Yeah, I’m glad to be back too. It’s a lot of fun and I have some friends in that area too that I hang out with so I look forward to coming back.

The guitar-drum duo, for some people, sounds a little unusual but you’ve done it in the past and this is a kind of revisiting of that format. And it’s because of your ability to play those bass lines along with all the other things that you do on the guitar, it really fills out this kind of format into a fatter sound. What do you find instinctively refreshing or just appealing about the guitar-drum format?

CHARLIE: Well I can only speak from my own experience with playing with Scott for many, many years. I’ve done duos with lots and lots of drummers, just like you said, because of my instrument, although you can call it a seven string guitar, it’s really quite a different instrument than a standard six string guitar and quite a different instrument than a standard four string bass. I’m hopefully, developing my own thing on it that allows me to do both those parts at once but what’s more important than that, not that I’m doing both parts at once, but that they’re simple enough for me to be able to play them. Also what goes as the counterpoint between the two parts is kind of the most important aspect of it, to me, in a lot of ways. So that’s how it’s probably a little more distinct than something else, you know?

Absolutely.

CHARLIE: There are so many great guitar players and great bass players in the world. For some reason, I’ve developed this different thing. I just do what I do and I try to get better at it all the time. I try to practice every day and try to evolve what I’m doing to make it more honest, and just play better overall. People come there expecting to see something different, and I apologize but I can only do what I can do. It makes me happy and hopefully it makes the audience happy.

In that duo context, there has to be more interaction and more playing against each other. That must drive both of you to new heights or at least to different avenues of exploration musically, that you may not get in a standard trio, quartet, and you’ve done the quintet thing along with so many others.

CHARLIE: The thing about having a duo, especially with Scott and I with the different influences we each bring to the thing together, is  you can really, without having a horn, what you lose in having the horn is not as much as you gain, I think. Because when you have a horn, especially a saxophone, it just says “Jazz”, big time, and that’s for better and for worse. When it’s just the two of us, you have the drums and you have, essentially, the guitar zone and the bass zone, that can go to so many different fields and so many different aesthetics. When we have the duo like we do it’s meant to have that ability to go from thing to thing without being encumbered by an instrument that just says “Jazz”. You know what I mean?

Right.

CHARLIE: If you want to play some stuff that would be influenced by the jazz idiom, you can but if you want to different things, whether its guitar vernacular, you can kind of do it in a way that is aesthetically...- you have all these colors you can use without feeling encumbered by any specific style.


CHARLIE: We are going into the studio in July, right after the Iowa City Jazz Festival. We are going into the studio to record another duo record but this time its really Scott’s record with all of his music. We’ll pretty much be doing the same thing only he’s supplying the songs.

That’s great. I assume we’ll probably be hearing some of Scott’s original music at the festival too.

CHARLIE: Yes you will.

We’re really looking forward to you and Scott returning to Eastern Iowa. I think its going to be a lot of fun. No doubt our listeners will be hearing excerpts from “Not Getting Behind is the New Getting Ahead”. Are there duo versions of some of the older stuff that you will be tackling?

CHARLIE: Sure. We do a lot of different music so we’re never sure what we’ll play.

Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola Duo on Saturday July 6th on the mainstage at 4pm at the 2013 Iowa City Jazz Festival.

CHARLIE: It should be a lot of fun.