Creativity Quote by Charlie Hunter

There is a small rebellion tucked into Charlie Hunter's casual phrasing: a horn player "comping" isnt just difficult, its almost a category error. In jazz, comping is the background engine room - chords, rhythmic push, harmonic suggestions - usually the job of piano or guitar. Horns get the spotlight: melody, lines, statements. When Hunter says its "really hard", he's acknowledging the physics and tradition at once. Horns are built to sing one note at a time, and the culture trains horn players to think like narrators, not accompanists.

Then he swerves into his real agenda: "switch those paradigms around". That's not theory-talk, it's a working musician describing an itch. Hunter has made a career out of hybrid roles and split-function instruments; he's drawn to places where the standard division of labor breaks down. The phrase "magic space" is doing heavy lifting: he's chasing the moment where a limitation becomes a sound, where the constraint forces a new rhythmic language - implied harmony, broken chords, percussive attacks, tight counterlines that suggest comping without literally playing it.

"Mine that" is the tell. He's not romanticizing experimentation as freedom; he's treating it as extraction. Find the seam, dig until the weird thing becomes repeatable, useful, even groovy. The subtext is a critique of jazz's polite job descriptions: innovation isn't always a new scale, sometimes it's a new assignment.