One of the most accomplished and soulful guitarists to emerge in the 1990s, Charlie Hunter made a name for himself wielding a custom-built eight-string instrument that allowed him to deliver stanky bass lines while playing grooves dripping with East Bay grease.
These days, the Berkeley-reared guitarist is slinging a signature seven-string Hybrid axe that he helped design, but rather than playing simultaneous bass lines, chords, and melodic lead, Hunter has found his way back to his happy place by supporting other, often undersung, musicians. Onstage and in the studio, where he’s produced a series of enthralling albums for Little Village Foundation and his own label, SideHustle Records, Hunter has quietly become a creative force propelling his colleagues.
Returning to the Bay Area for a series of gigs, including a hometown performance at Freight & Salvage on Dec. 12, Hunter is right where he wants to be, shining a spotlight on Oakland-reared Jubu Smith, a fellow guitar master who’s spent his career supporting acts like Tony! Toni! Toné!, Whitney Houston, and for the past 15 years, Frankie Beverly & Maze.
“I’ve always had to be a bandleader and play these nifty solos, but it’s not the thing that makes me happiest. I just want to sit in the pocket,” said Hunter, 57, in a recent phone conversation from his Greensboro, North Carolina, home.
Hunter, Smith, and drummer Calvin Napper also perform on Dec. 14 at HopMonk Tavern in Novato and two shows on Dec. 16 at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center. While both guitarists graduated from Berkeley High, Smith is young “enough that we didn’t overlap,” Hunter said. “By the time he was on the scene, I was a street musician in Europe. And when I came back, he was out doing Tony! Toni! Toné! We knew a million people in common, but we were never in town at the same time.”
The supremely grooveable force of Hunter met the irresistibly soulful rock of Smith last year when the former produced the album Jubu for Little Village, a powerhouse session with Napper that draws equally from the overlapping realms of jazz, rock, and blues. The idea was to showcase a player who’s thrived for three decades making the headlining stars shine. Smith has helped supply that intense wattage ever since the age of 19, when he started a decade-long stint with Tony! Toni! Toné!
Averse to publicity, Smith is an artist who’d rather let his instrument talk, though he’s led his own soul-blues combos like the Jubu Smith Experience and Legally Blynd (a group with which he’s collaborated with R&B divas like Lalah Hathaway and Ledisi). As a hired gun, he’s contributed to sessions by the likes of Luther Vandross, Mary J. Blige, Toni Braxton, Boyz II Men, George Duke, and guitar legend George Benson.
The best tactic for working with Smith, Hunter figured, was running his own seven-string guitar through a Hammond organ Leslie speaker, a trick that served him well in T.J. Kirk, the fondly remembered Bay Area combo that featured himself, drummer Scott Amendola, and fellow East Bay guitarists Will Bernard and John Schott. “I didn’t want to get in the way, so it was about leaving all that space for Jubu,” Hunter said. “It’s always the thing I’ve liked the most.”
His work in the studio is another way that Hunter makes space for other artists. Over the past few years, his most visible and productive collaboration has been SuperBlue with Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist Kurt Elling. Working with an array of artists in hip-hop, R&B, and funk, Hunter and Elling have recorded a series of albums that have taken the vocalist far out of his comfort zone. On their latest dispatch, Guilty Pleasures (featuring funk drum maestro Nate Smith), they tackle songs by everyone from Eddie Money (“Baby Hold On”) and PJ Morton (“Sticking to My Guns”) to AC/DC (“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”) and Isaac Hayes (“Wrap It Up”).
Whatever Hunter throws at Elling, the singer makes it his own. “He’s one of the baddest mofos out there,” Hunter said. “That dude is like a Sherman tank. For Guilty Pleasures, we just started with, ‘What did you listen to as a kid? You listened to this corny-ass song? Me too.’ There’s a lot of jazz in [this album], but the building blocks are not super tied to the style.”
Though Hunter often works in jazz venues and is a highly effective improviser, he’s never considered himself a jazz musician. Swing, the fundamental pulse of straight-ahead jazz for nearly a century, isn’t his natural forte. Rather, Hunter is steeped in various shades of soul and funk. It’s a skill set he put to epochal use on D’Angelo’s 2000 neo-soul manifesto Voodoo, a landmark album in the emergent Black pop movement.
While his music tends toward Saturday-night revelry, Hunter is equally adept at Sunday-morning fervor. Sacred music is the template that guides Greensboro pedal-steel maestro DaShawn Hickman’s collaboration with Hunter on the 2022 Little Village album Drums, Roots & Steel. But no album better displays his savvy as a producer than self-described “avant-soul” vocalist Candice Ivory’s Little Village release When the Levee Breaks: The Music of Memphis Minnie.
Ivory connected with the label through South Bay harmonica player Aki Kumar, whose Little Village albums put his Bollywood blues repertoire on the international circuit. Working with Hunter, she tapped into her formative Memphis roots, when she spent her weekend nights hanging out and singing on Beale Street “and had to get up and go play in church Sunday morning,” she said.
They bonded over their shared history with D’Angelo (as a child, Ivory studied voice with him when he was known as Michael Archer) and love of Black roots musicians, like ragtime guitarist Blind Blake and Memphis Minnie, one of the most influential and popular blues artists of the 1930s and ’40s. A highly effective vocalist and masterly guitarist, Minnie recorded around 200 tracks, more than any other female blues artist of the era, including standards like “Nothing in Rambling,” “Looking the World Over,” and “Bumble Bee,” which Ivory and Hunter recast with a gentle Taj Mahal-inspired reggae groove.
“With Charlie we can play anything,” Ivory said. “He has all these ideas, and we approached the blues not in a jazz way sound-wise but with that artistic sensibility. We improvised quite a bit. He brought in DaShawn Hickman with the sacred steel on ‘Crazy Crying Blues,’ and it’s like an Art Ensemble [of Chicago] devotional recording, like a deacon in my grandmother’s church.”
For Hunter, tapping into that wild and raw energy is the ultimate goal, whomever he’s working with. In an era when music is often polished to a bright sheen or defiantly lo-fi, he’s dedicated to catching soul in a bottle.
“The thing is, I want to hear this kind of music, and it’s not out there,” Hunter said. “Everything I see that manages to do good commercially, it doesn’t sound deep and invested in the roots of that music. It doesn’t bring that deep magic to me. You’ve got to do what you can do and put it out there.”
