Charlie Hunter Trio at The BlueShore at Cap, Tuesday, Dec. 12 at 8 p.m. For more information visit capilanou.ca.
When Charlie Hunter was four years old his family did something that countless other generations of Americans had found necessary to do before them: they headed west.
Leaving Rhode Island, the Hunter clan veered through the states en route to the West Coast, eventually settling in California.
“We lived in a school bus for four or five years, we lived in communes, all of it,” Hunter tells the North Shore News during a phone call from San Francisco. And then adds with a laugh: “There was always music going around – but I don’t want to say it was always good music.”
That might ring true for some of the tunes that a younger Hunter was exposed to during the family’s tenure in communes, but his mother was always an inspiring force when it came to his musical education, he says.
And when the family later settled in Berkeley, Calif. Hunter’s musical education entered full swing.
The legendary axe man, now 50 years old and best known as a fine wielder of seven- and eight-string guitars, is bringing his chops to Capilano University’s BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts Dec. 12.
In a career that spans more than two decades, Hunter has released numerous albums, either as a solo artist or with his trio or quartet, as well as contributed to numerous esteemed projects as a session guitar player.
His most recent recording, 2016’s Everybody Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth, fuses 10 tracks of blues, rock, jazz and Latin-flavoured songs into a knockout punch of an album.
The album’s mishmash of musical genres pairs well with the musical cloth that Hunter is cut from.
“My mom played and she listened to a lot of the old blues guys and knew a lot of them as well, so we always had blues going around the house. She repaired guitars as well – I basically just grew up around guitars,” he says.
And when he was older and started taking formal lessons he was lucky to receive instruction from one of the masters in the art of guitar shredding.
“My guitar teacher was Joe Satriani,” he says. “He was just the guy that taught guitar in the guitar store. Everyone played, everyone in my town played, and you didn’t even notice it because you just kind of took it for granted because that’s all you knew really.”
In his late teens, Hunter ventured to France and laid the groundwork for working as a musician by vicariously busking on the streets of Paris.
When he returned to the U.S. in the early 1990s he quickly began playing with other musical acts and released his first trio album in 1993.
Not satisfied with the limitations inherent in six-string guitars, he submitted to the challenge – and when pulled off correctly, splendour – of playing on seven or eight string instruments.
Asked how that transition came about, Hunter doesn’t offer any stringent thesis on why seven trumps six, however.
“It’s really not that big a deal,” he says. “I mean, the guitar is just a folk instrument and every culture has their own kind of purpose-evolved instrument to execute whatever’s important to them.”
He goes on: “I could technically do what I do on a six-string guitar … but my goal was to have a nice big thing that could give me that feeling of the drum set and the bass and the guitar.”
Best known as a guitarist able to singlehandedly pull off playing lead guitar, scorching solos and encompass a rhythm section all by his lonesome, Hunter says his fascination with playing all-encompassing seven-string guitar lies in the challenge of self-editing and creating exciting musical interplay all on the spot.
And despite his successes he modestly argues that even at 50 years old he’s still “working my ass off just to get good at it.”
A passionate advocate for independent artists (he was an inaugural judge for the Independent Music Awards), he works hard to make sure other artists have a chance to get good at it too.
When the News speaks with Hunter he’s crestfallen that Mexican singer, musician and artist Silvana Estrada is having that chance denied to her, at least in the U.S.
Estrada, an upcoming artist who Hunter describes as “a really awesome songwriter,” was scheduled to play alongside the guitar player and his band for a string of dates in Canada and the U.S. this December, but her visa was denied at the last minute.
“We did everything correctly,” he says. “Only thing I can think of is it’s just the Trump era right now. … It actually makes me sad because the whole point of this music thing is to bring different cultures and people together and at least have that rapport.”
With Estrada’s absence, Hunter was able to fill the void last minute with tenor saxophone player Rob Dixon. “It’s going to be really fun regardless, but the thing with Silvana is she’s just a special person, musician, and it was going to be really off the chain,” he says.
He says in light of the tense climate of everyday life in America he’s become more emboldened politically and wants to champion greater diversity and new voices in music, meaning he was feeling particularly bitter about Estrada’s visa rejection.
But he adds it’s hard to tell whether his raw political energy was overtly making its way into the music he’s making now, especially because as an instrumentalist a lot of his music is wordless.
“We as a society have so many things that we have to address and it takes a lot of energy and a lot of honesty to address those issues. And I think the majority of us are just not really ready to do that yet,” he says.
“Our job (as musicians) is to just be a kind of non-verbal, subconscious reality check for people that our living at the time we’re living.” He pauses. Then: “Maybe it does make it into it, you know?”
