Charlie Hunter
Guitar wizard Charlie Hunter and drummer Scott Amendola, who did two shows at the Dakota jazz club on Monday night, Nov. 5, are kindred spirits. Both favor unorthodox, irreverent, cliche-mashing approaches to their respective instruments.
The two have been musical collaborators for nearly 20 years. They both were members of one of the most memorable jazz groups in recent memory: the 1990s Bay Area combo T.J. Kirk, whose repertoire consisted of gleeful mashups of music by Thelonious Monk, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and James Brown.
On their current tour, Amendola and Hunter function as a two-man jam band, though without the long-winded musical verbosity often associated with that noodle-dancing genre.
Hunter plays a custom-designed seven-string guitar that allows him to play bass lines with his thumb while using his fingers to pick melodies and unconventional chord-voicings of his own design.
Their opening set at the Dakota in downtown Minneapolis consisted of several tunes from their new topically-titled album, "Not Getting Behind Is the New Getting Ahead."
Hunter's sardonically-titled tune "Assessing the Assessors, An Assessor's Assessment," started out as a blues-tinged ballad with, at one point, a loping, Jimmy Reed-like beat that morphed into some Space Age fretwork.
"Rust Belt" was a strutting funk piece with a thudding bass-and-drum line, punctuated with Hunter's jazzy single-note runs.
The equally creative Amendola often seemed to be playing
complementary counter melodies on his drums and cymbals.At times, his spare, spacious rhythms evoked the influential, less-is-more style of the great New Orleans funk drummer Zig Modeliste.
Rather than using the standard drummer-in-the-back, guitarist-up-front configuration, longtime musical foils Hunter and Amendola faced each other like two well-matched sparring partners. A very physical guitarist, Hunter often grimaced and growled like a theatrical pro wrestler delivering a body slam.
While Hunter has always distinguished himself as a futuristic guitar stylist, he also has a firm connection to seminal musical roots, throwing in abstract updates of early 20th-century blues grooves.
Hunter's finger-picked piece "Blind Arthur" paid tribute to one of his early ax influences, the great ragtime six-stringer Blind Blake.
His instrumental rendition of Bessie Smith's "You Been A Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down" featured a lopsided, thudding drum beat that did sketch the mental image of a busted wagon.
Dan Emerson is a freelance writer and musician in Minneapolis.
Source: http://www.twincities.com/music/ci_21936404/charlie-hunter-and-scott-amendola-jazz-it-up?source=rss
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