The Charlie Hunter Trio

Mistico - Concord Records The Charlie Hunter Trio has a record that sounds like Juke Joint Jazz. It's fusion for sure, but it's not your father's jazz-rock fusion.

For one thing, there are only two songs that are over six minutes long, unlike the jazz-fusion from the '70s, where songs tended to take up a whole side of an album. This allowed '70s DJs to run to their cars to smoke a cigarette or whatever DJs smoked back then.

The guitar sound on Mistico is a very dirty blues sound, and the drums are recorded in such a way that it sounds as though Simon Lott is right in your living room, alive and not processed through effects. The keyboard playing from Erik Deutsch alternates between a traditional classic Fender Rhodes sound to cheesy Casio keyboard and everything in between. Hunter plays the bass lines on his seven-string guitar, where the bottom two strings are actually bass strings with different bass pickups, giving them a genuine thump. Like playing two instruments at once, he plays both the bass lines and guitar lines at the same time. From a distance it sounds as though he is moving in on Medeski, Martin and Wood's turf, but when you step a bit closer you can see that he has his very own thing going on. There is something in this soup for everyone.