Jazz breaking news: Sunday Speakeasy sells out to the soulful James Hunter
Monday, January 9, 2012
James Hunter has one of those voices that can stop you dead in your tracks.
On the one hand it’s an uncanny reaching out to Sam Cooke. On the other the singer and guitarist sends you on a trip to soulsville and the birth of rock ’n’ roll. On the Chitlin’ Circuit in the late 1940s and into the 50s they were whipping up the crowds from Natchez to Memphis and down to New Orleans, and soul, jazz, rhythm & blues all came together in one big beautiful pot – and that’s part of Hunter’s great appeal today.
Appearing at Hideaway’s Sunday Speakeasy in front of a sold out house on an unrainy Streatham night, Hunter had brought his band, with stand up bass and drums alongside his own effectively clattering electric guitar completing the rhythm section, plus tenor and baritone saxes, and played two sets of songs that instantly send you, to echo Cooke, somewhere you want to be.
Capable of injecting passion, soulfulness and energy into his material, Hunter was at his best on ‘Jacqueline’, and his take on the Ray Noble ballad ‘The Very Thought Of You’ in the first set showed his jazz chops, and of course he moved into another gear on his own well honed songs that sounded as if they could have been written for Cooke himself.
At times Hunter and the band cranked up the rhythms to make you think of a young Them, not so much for the timbre of his voice which is a little higher than Van Morrison’s was back in the day and more classically soulful, but in the attitude and commitment he brings to the songs. A strong band led from the double bass by Jason Wilson and featuring tenorist Damian Hand breaking out with chitlin’-flavoured no nonsense sax lines aided and abetted by the marinated baritone sax playing of Lee Badau. Hand’s Chu Berry-like heat had the sharp dressers in the audience – the gents with their big coats and slicked back hair, the ladies with their retro hems and couldn't-believe-they-were-there faces – relax into the music, kick back and enjoy themselves, some unselfconsciously dancing by the bar, and yelling for ‘Watch And Chain’. Good unobtrusive support came throughout from band drummer, the red shirted Jonathan Lee. But a jacketless up-for-it Hunter, mopping his brow when the towels arrived early on, nonetheless was the magnetic field that everyone was drawn to
– Stephen Graham