In the hands of Hunter, it was much more. Second, that the guitar can be more than just a guitar. First, keep an open mind about how bands are constructed. This was not the band I was expecting to see, which taught me a few things. He used all different types of percussion to keep the beat alive. Damon Grant was Hunter’s rhythmic accomplice on percussion. I later found out she has music available on her own. Her voice was nothing less than amazing and was a perfect fit with the trio. In many ways, Hunter was her support act. I can imagine at times he wished he had more fingers.ĭara Tucker was the vocalist and she really brought a lot of life to the show. This is a bit of a hybrid machine and requires the technical facility to pull the whole thing off. You don’t just pick a guitar like this up and start strumming chords on it. I have had the notion for quite some time that guitar represents the right hand of the piano and the bass the left. The second is it allows someone to think like a piano player on the guitar. The first and most obvious is playing bass and guitar at the same time. This allows a player to do different things. There are two pickups on the instrument that allow splitting the bass and guitar strings into separate amps. This made me look up his rig rundown today and I discovered that the bottom three strings on his guitar are bass strings, and the top four are guitar strings. Then I noticed he was running through two amps. It was a seven-string, but it seemed to get notes lower than that, so perhaps the bass string was tuned down a bit. The first thing I noticed was he had bass notes coming out the guitar. Hunter does a good job of making you not missing the fact there is no bass player.
The Charlie Hunter Trio was a bit more like R&B - and heavily Blues flavored at times. I know what you’re thinking.Jazz has many forms. I was also expecting something more in the Jazz vein, but I was wrong on that, too. But what we got was guitar, VOCALS and drums. Meanwhile, I was sitting with someone that told me to expect guitar, sax and drums.
I was thinking I’d hear the usual fare of guitar, bass and drums – standard trio stuff. For information call 77 or see the Web site, I heard the Charlie Hunter Trio was playing Chicago’s City Winery over this past weekend, I expected something quite different. Events include a zoo tour and musical excursions to the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park. "And I realized they're going to be lost."ĬhicagoGayTours.Com will offer more than a dozen tours and events in the next few months. "I developed a passion for these stories," he says. In search of Chicago's gay history, de la Croix has interviewed bar-goers in alleys. "There would be cops outside with a flashlight checking to see if they had their flies in front," which was considered a masculine style, de la Croix says. Police enforced an old cross-dressing law that required women to wear three items of "female apparel." In the frantic early minutes of a raid, some women would run to the bathroom and trade clothes in an attempt to achieve the legally mandated minimum of women's attire. In the 1960s, lesbian bars were subjected to a particular form of police scrutiny. A few blocks away is a lesbian bar that opened in 1965.
Across the street was the now defunct Blue Pub, which de la Croix has traced back to at least 1971. Irving Park Rd., was part of a triangle of gay bars.