\u201cIs it rock? Is it funk? Is it jazz? YES!\u201d<\/p>\n
So sayeth the promo sheet for this album, and it doth not lie.\u00a0 Longtime Bay Area jazz-guitar iconoclast Charlie Hunter is a one-man musical smorgasbord, not to mention the self-proclaimed \u201cmaster of the seven-stringed guitar\u201d — a title for which one imagines he has little competition, but which he nonetheless proves himself more than worthy of claiming.<\/p>\n
If the music isn\u2019t sounding interesting enough to you yet, get this\u00a0— in this latest incarnation of his eponymous trio, Hunter is joined by Simon Lott on drums and Erik Deutsch on piano, fender Rhodes and CasioTone.\u00a0 That\u2019s right, no bass player; Hunter covers that territory himself on the two bass strings he\u2019s added to his customized five-string guitar.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Deutsch plays jazz piano with one hand while the other is playing tinkly-cheese Casio synth riffs.<\/p>\n
No, really.<\/p>\n
In terms of tone and style, Hunter the guitar-slinger finds some heretofore unexplored musical nexus between Miles Davis, George Clinton and Jimi Hendrix.\u00a0 \u201cSpeakers Built In\u201d (for example) starts out with comfortably fuzzy Jimi-riffing, then stutter-steps into a spacy bridge, then bursts back into its funk-n-roll \u201cverses,\u201d before Hunter goes off on a twisting, distortion-laced mind-bender of a solo\u2026 and then we\u2019re back to a soul groove that Al Green would know exactly what to do with.\u00a0 Oh, and then the closing solo just before the end of this 6:20 tune comes on like John McLaughlin and Steve Howe battling to a draw while Pink Floyd\u2019s Rick Wright plays slumbering keys in the background.<\/p>\n
Did I mention the smorgasbord part yet?<\/p>\n
\u201cBalls\u201d starts out like a late \u201860s psychedelic stomper, with a sort of Procol-Harum-meets-Jimmy Page organ-guitar space-funk thing happening, except in the middle where it breaks down for a drum solo that starts out herky-jerky and gradually builds to a thunderous crescendo before the other two come back in.\u00a0 Yeah, um, and then at the end it breaks down to a full-on two-handed piano-and-Casio freak-out.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Whew.<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cLady!\u201d has a nice little blues strut at its core, but Hunter\u2019s trembly tone and the faintly eerie Casio textures and Lott\u2019s percussive pure-jazz time-keeping lend the whole thing a sort of dreamy psychedelic feel.\u00a0 And Deutsch\u2019s two-handed solo, piano vs. Casio?\u00a0 Bizarre, yet compelling.\u00a0 Other highlights include the off-kilter funk of \u201cWizard Sleeve,\u201d the melodic-fusion-plus-distortion of \u201cSpecial Shirt,\u201dthe drowsy slow blues of the title track, and the mind-blowing closer \u201cChimp Gut,\u201d whose jazzed-out Tex-Mex boogie beat Hunter decorates with solos that throw in tones and phrases that range from straight blues to jazz-funk to hints of Middle Eastern swirl and country twang.\u00a0\u00a0 Duuuuuuude.<\/p>\n
Like many albums that demand as much musical range and patience from the listener as this one, I\u2019m not sure how often in the future I\u2019ll pull Mistico<\/i> out for another go.\u00a0 But for the jazz guitar lover \u2013 or for any music fan in a particularly adventurous mood — this thing is like nitroglycerin for the imagination, explosive and beautiful all at once.\u00a0 Not for the faint of heart, but for the open-minded, a genuinely expansive experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8073],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40567","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-charlie-hunter-trio","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40567"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}