Right Now Groove
An Excerpt from the July/August 2003 issue
By Andrew Beaujon

In the parlance of their parents' times, they are "waiting for a miracle." A good number of the young people loitering in front of the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, Va., tonight are sitting patiently in their tie-dyed shirts or apron tops, holding one finger in the air. At a sporting event, this gesture would mean "We're No. 1" or perhaps "Hot dog over here," but in this context it signifies "I had neither the means nor the foresight to purchase a ticket to this event, and it would greatly benefit your karma should you deign to give or sell me one." Elsewhere, some gyrating young women are honing their Hula Hoop skills, much to the distraction of the venue's security guards, who completely ignore the flagrant scalping going on underneath their noses.

Inside, the theater is more opulent than P. Diddy's bathroom, resplendent with heavy maroon curtains and gilded doodads sticking out from every wall. A curious haze hangs over the proceedings, especially curious since the Carpenter Center is a nonsmoking venue and no fog machines appear to be in use. Gentle people and fellow travelers greet one another in the aisles, exchanging hugs and sharing memories of summer festivals. A battalion of home tapers is bivouacked in the balcony; newsletters on chairs make reverent references to mystical crap such as the "djembe birds of the borderline."

A roar greets guitarist Charlie Hunter as he and his trio take the stage, heads down as if they're intimidated by the weeded hordes so stoked by their presence. "Thank God the music's here!" screams a guy in a backwards baseball cap and a shirt that turns the Adidas logo into a pot leaf.

Dude.

Welcome to a jazz show.

This seems like as good a time as any to mention that one of Charlie Hunter's boyhood homes was a school bus. "It's funny," he says, laughing. "All these years that I tried my hardest to get as far away from the hippie experience as possible—as you would probably want to if you grew up in that situation—it's funny that somehow they found me later on in life!"

His dressing room at the Carpenter Center, while spartan, seems a bazillion miles away from those days. But for Hunter, a son of Berkeley, Calif., the bohemian life is never too distant. Sure, he quit Northern California for Brooklyn years ago, the better to concentrate on his jazz-scene chops, and he recently moved out to New Jersey, the better to concentrate on his family (a wife and two kids), but yes, that is someone soundchecking a flute through a delay pedal downstairs, and yes, these hippie kids love him. The reason we're here, in fact, and not in some intimate jazz boîte, is that Hunter's trio is opening for the jam band String Cheese Incident.

"I get the cream of the hippie crop, what I call the 'hippie trickle-down,'" he says. "I feel like a lot of these quote-unquote jam bands are coming out of a rock kind of thing, and they're trying to improvise with a very limited vocabulary. But it's enough for their fans to get a little taste of something that's outside of the radio mainstream. I feel like these kinds of bands are a gateway for kids to make a journey to be able to listen to music more like mine, or Medeski Martin & Wood, or people like Marc Ribot. We're not all born listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. We need to grow into that."

You wouldn't lose money betting that the only growing currently done by the kids outside involves hundreds of dollars' worth of hydroponic equipment, but it is true: Scratch a hippie, find a nonpop musician's last best hope for record buyers under the age of 40. The second-annual Bonnaroo festival, which took place this June in Tennessee, boasted a lineup that comprised artists as disparate as James Brown, jam-band stalwarts Widespread Panic, bluegrass pinups Nickel Creek, New York City noise rockers Sonic Youth, überhip DJ RJD2 and reggae pioneers Toots and the Maytals. Charlie Hunter was there as well, with his white noise improv band Garage à Trois.
The only thing most of these artists have in common? Mainstream radio won't play them, major labels won't sign them and inattentive music consumers have no use for them. Kind of sounds like—well, a bit like jazz, doesn't it?

"Even if you don't dig the music or the culture, you gotta give it up for jam bands operating so successfully outside of the mainstream," Hunter says. "And it is a real alternative, because it's coming from the same background as music within the cultural mainstream. But they're doing their own business model.

I think we've got to applaud that." Indeed, while a few of the Grateful Dead-influenced groups that became the objects of bidding wars in the post-Dave Matthews/Hootie gold rush remain on major-label rosters, most jam bands operate as extremely successful small businesses, booking their own tours, putting out their own records, even in many cases running their own charitable foundations. (The String Cheese Incident's charity is called—wait for it—Gouda Causes.)

Hunter divides his time between this demimonde and the more traditional jazz milieu. A couple weeks before this show I saw him in the Ram's Head Tavern, a more traditional jazz club in Annapolis, Md. While there were in fact two dudes in the vestibule hoping for a miracle—as well as a home taper who did a really convincing imitation of a roadie, sporting a ponytail, a Harley-Davidson shirt and one of those tiny flashlights—most of the (considerably smaller) sellout crowd was a typical jazz audience in khakis, button-down shirts and sweaters. Lots of sweaters. They bobbed their heads appreciatively as Hunter, then leading his quintet—drummer Jeff Clapp (filling in for Hunter's usual drummer, Derrek Phillips), tenor saxophonist/bass clarinetist John Ellis, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, harmonicist Gregoire Maret—found the pocket, and they seemed oblivious to how ridiculously overpriced the food and drinks were, the key to a return engagement.

"If I play a really hardcore jazz club, it alienates [my rock audience], and if I play a really hardcore rock club, it alienates the people who go to the jazz clubs," Hunter says. "So I have to find the places in between, like Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, or Yoshi's [in Oakland, Calif.] is good, or the Ram's Head. It's a diverse audience, which I'm real proud of."

Still, there's no way he'd trade his jazz audience for the limelight afforded by the jam-band circuit. "I'd love the money, believe me," he says, "but there's not much more I'd enjoy about that, because when you become such a commodity, the musical experience with your audience and your dedication to your craft wears down a little bit. But if all of a sudden tomorrow we were doing exactly what we were doing and we were playing 1,000-seat halls, which is about as likely as being struck by lightning and winning the lottery, I would be fine with that.

"It's a business, unfortunately," he continues. "Our society isn't driven by spiritual wealth or intellectual wealth or wealth of the good life—living and eating and being with your family. We're only driven by the bottom line. When you try to make a living in this country that incorporates those other kinds of wealth, it makes it kind of difficult. But you know, it's just a challenge, and it's fun to find a way to try to make it work."

Charlie Hunter has seen wealth upfront, when he opened for U2. Not with any of his jazz groups—heavens, no—but about 10 years ago, when his main gig was playing bass with brainy hip-hoppers the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Prior to that, he'd been teaching guitar in Berkeley's Subway Guitars. Hiphoprisy founder Michael Franti worked there as well, alongside Alvin Youngblood Hart and the dude from Testament, repairing guitars. (The store's owner went by the name Fatdog. Enough said.) Before that, he passed a few years as a street musician in Europe. And before that, he attended Berkeley High School, where he was two years ahead of Joshua Redman. (Other famous Berkeley High saxophonist alums include Peter Apfelbaum, whom Hunter's played with, and Tower of Power leader Lenny Pickett.)

The complete feature can be found in the July/ August 2003 issue of JazzTimes