Charlie Hunter Trio
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At 40, Hunter shows no signs of abandoning this vagabond spirit. Without a doubt the most experimental of his projects is the frequently exhilarating and occasionally bewildering duo-plus-one called Groundtruther, with drummer and composer Bobby Previte. The two have created a trilogy of albums for the intrepid Thirsty Ear label, each featuring a different guest musician. Their exotic soundscapes, aggressive tone poems, and whirling free-form improvisations, perched between jazz and electronica, have provided Hunter and especially Previte–whose own projects, emphasizing his compositions, tend to be a lot more buttoned up–with an opportunity for nearly untrammeled expression. And the guests who’ve joined them have likewise relished the chance to stretch out in directions they’re not used to.
Hunter and Previte put out Latitude in 2004 with saxist Greg Osby and Longitude in 2005 with DJ Logic, the most adept among those turntablists attempting the thankless task of fitting their work into this sort of creative music. Altitude, which came out this week, took a little longer to get here, but it runs a little longer too: it’s in fact two discs, “Below Sea Level” and “Above Sea Level,” which at last bring keyboardist John Medeski into the mix. I say “at last” because anyone following this project’s arc should have seen Medeski coming: in Medeski Martin & Wood, the preeminent jazz-jam band, he’s regularly ventured away from the groove and dipped his toes into the murky subterranean pools that Groundtruther has plumbed so deeply.
I also can’t make a call yet as to whether Hunter’s experience in Groundtruther will leave a mark on the trio he leads under his own name–if anything, it seems to have provided an outlet for ideas that didn’t fit into his other projects, and I haven’t seen much crossover. But the latest disc from that trio, this summer’s Mistico (Fantasy), does have something in common with “Above Sea Level”–in this version of the group, Hunter employs a keyboard player in the core lineup for the first time, which lets him hand off the bass lines to somebody else once in a while. This is the band Hunter brings to the Old Town School on Sunday, with drummer Simon Lott and keyboardist Erik Deutsch, and Deutsch’s phalanx of acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, and synthesizer helps the group approximate the denser textures of Altitude. With identifiable actual “tunes,” the keen-edged, tough-minded Mistico rocks harder than the new Groundtruther. It seems like Hunter can play this sort of material by intuition alone, without self-consciously pushing himself in one direction or another the way he does with Previte.
