Charlie Hunter Quintet
5/28/1997 -
Elbo Room,
San Francisco, CA
Late Show
BARN225 / VGRM700

Late Show-
1. tuning
2. The Gobbler
3. Shake, Shake It Baby
4. **
5. Common Ground
6. banter - band intros
7. Lively Up Yourself

**=same exact song as track 6 on https://archive.org/details/chunter1996-11-21.flac16 -- if anyone can identify this, PLEASE leave a comment below or message me on Facebook or Twitter

The Band:
Charlie Hunter - 8-string guitar (guitar/bass)
Scott Amendola - drums
Chuck McKinnon - trumpet
Calder Spanier - alto saxophone
Kenny Brooks - tenor saxophone

Original master DAT recording: AT-825 (center stage lip)->Tascam-DAP1->Denon DTR80pm (via digital patch)

DAT playback: Sony R500 -> Sound Devices 722 digital input (@24/48)

Mastered: Soundforge Pro 13.0 - *All file manipulation in Soundforge done at 24 bits*. File processed in Soundforge for volume normalization, scrubbing out about 25 subsecond digital dropouts; 24 -> 16 bit dither using POW-r Dither with POW-r #3 noise shaping. Tracked in CDWav. Tagged in Tag&Rename 3.9.15

Additional mastering by Bill "VGRM": fixed the dc offset; very light compression to handle some of the drum hit peaks; EQ'd a healthy, tasty bit of bass into it as that was pretty much non-existent to begin with; worked to fix the distorted section at the beginning (the first 55 seconds of the recording); fixed levels at the beginning to make them consistent with where they settled to; raised +2.00db after all above processing, making sure to not have any clipping; some loud, close claps cleanly removed; fixed an additional 7 subsecond dropouts and 2 digital "click spikes"

Recorded by Scott Bernstein
Transferred (4/1/2012), re-transferred (5/2/2020), tracked (11/14/2019), initial mastering (10/18/2021 by sb), additional mastering (11/4/2021 by Bill M) and posted (11/22/2021) by Scott Bernstein

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Taper notes (BARN):
Charlie Hunter is a killer jazz/funk/groove guitarist and bassist (indeed, back then played his own custom 8-string instrument with 5 guitar & 3 bass strings -- though now he has trimmed that down to 7 strings); his gear allows him to often imitate the sound of a hammond organ with a Leslie cabinet. I first heard of him back in early 1996 from my friend Kevin Landry, and knew that he was somehow signed to Les Claypool's record label. I've since seen him dozens & dozens of times in various combinations (Trio, Quartet, Quintet, in duos with Bobby Previte, in trios with Bobby Previte & DJ Logic, in trios with Bobby Previte & rotating jazz greats, in his band Pound For Pound featuring a vibraphone player, in Garage A Trios with Stanton Moore & Skerik, in TJ Kirk, etc etc.) One of the things about Charlie is that beyond his serious jazz, blues, groove, and funk chops, he's got a great sense of humor in both his playing and his attitude towards his music and performance.

Getting to this recording, BARN225 which I have been trying to get out since as far back as 2012 -- I happened to be in San Francisco on a business trip, and while I was there I met up with my friend Geoff Tischman and we decided to head out to the famous jazz club, the Elbo Room. I'd already had some tapes of some earlier Charlie Hunter shows from the Elbo Room, so I knew he considered it to be kind of his "home venue", so I was psyched to see him! We only made it in time for the late show, and since I wanted to travel lightly, I didn't bring out my whole rig -- just my trusty little Denon DTR-80p, which was tiny (though it chomped through 6 batteries to record a 3 hour show) and easy to toss into my travel bag.

When I got there, I looked to see if anyone else was taping, and there were no other tapers in the house. But I did notice that the band had put one of those Audio Technica 825 stereo mics on stage to tape the show. I asked Charlie if I could get a patch, and he said "Sure!" Well, they must not have been super familiar with the recording gear they were using as I noticed within a minute that the levels were hardly moving -- which indicated that something wasn't set correctly on the recorder, but I knew exactly what it was -- when you patched a microphone into a Tascam DA-P1, you needed to put the "Mic Pad" switch on -20db to avoid analog distortion on the inputs. So as quickly as I could, I fixed this setting and the recording turned out beautiful. So, about the first minute of the recording was somewhat distorted. And if I hadn't been at this show, the band's recording would also have been completely useless (as I'm sure their recording of the early show likely is).

Fast forward to 2012 when I first transferred this show to work on. I worked on it back then...but there was a whole bunch of digital errors in the transfer. So in 2020, I finally got around to attempting another transfer...and most (but not all) of the digital errors in the recording came up as dropouts or little digital "zits" in the same exact places, sadly. Luckily I was able to mask all of the digital errors because they were very very short. After I did my work on this recording, Bill M asked to take a shot at doing his best in trying to correct the analog distortion within the first minute of the recording (my initial take on this was that I was going to edit that part out and fade the recording in once things got properly dialed in) -- and I think his results (while not perfect) do make even the first minute listenable. So, give this a minute into the first track...if you find the opening minute unlistenable, you can just skip past it on your own. Bill also tossed in a little bit of EQ to add some of the deep bass from Charlie's bass strings that the AT-825 can't really capture.

Onto this show -- it's pretty representative of the material he was playing at the time from his first 2 albums...but also contains a STELLAR version of Bob Marley's "Lively Up Yourself" from his track-by-track cover of "Natty Dread" from the "Blue Note Covers Series" albums the label had put out around this time. I actually wish that this recording had a few more of those Marley tracks in the setlist. This was really a high point for this Quintet lineup featuring Charlie's most frequent partner (besides maybe Bobby Previte) Scott Amendola on drums plus Kenny Brooks (who would go on to play with Bob Weir's band Ratdog) on sax, Calder Spanier on sax, and Chuck McKinnon on trumpet. Alas, this lineup was not able to stay together much longer -- due to the sad fact that Calder was tragically killed at 31 years of age when his stalled car was hit by another driver on his way home from a gig in December of 1997.

After this, the next time I saw Charlie perform was in 1998 with his new band called Pound For Pound which was a radical rethinking of his sound, replacing the horns with a vibraphone.

Enjoy!

vanillag NOTES (VGRM700):
--fixed the dc offset,
--did a little, very light compression to handle some of the drum hit peaks
--EQ'd a healthy, tasty bit of bass into it as that was pretty much non-existent to begin with
--worked to fix the distorted section at the beginning (the first 55 seconds of the recording) to the best of my abilities
--fixed levels at the beginning to make them consistent with where they settled to.
--raised +2.00db after all above processing, making sure to not have any clipping.
--some loud, close claps cleanly removed.
--I fixed 7 subsecond dropouts that I also found while working on it.
--also fixed 2 digital 'click spikes' I found while working on it.

Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.

Images for this show: