Art & Creativity Quote by Charlie Hunter

Hunter is naming a quiet rebellion against the way “jazz” gets packaged: as a sport of individual brilliance, a sequence of heroic solos with everyone else dutifully comping in the background. By reaching for “jazz sensibility” and then swerving away from “solos,” he’s trying to keep the feel while ditching the trophy. The hesitation in “I guess whatever you want to call it” matters. It’s not verbal sloppiness so much as an allergy to genre-policing. He wants the elasticity, the harmonic curiosity, the conversational time-feel people associate with jazz, without inviting the gatekeepers who demand a certain ritual: head, solos, head, applause.

The intent is structural, not anti-virtuosic. Hunter’s music still requires chops; it just distributes the spotlight. “Not have it be about solos” points to groove-forward writing, interlocking lines, and band chemistry where improvisation is embedded in the fabric instead of quarantined into turns. It’s closer to how a great rhythm section thinks: constant micro-decisions, responsiveness, collective momentum.

Contextually, that stance lands in a late-20th/early-21st-century moment where jazz musicians are negotiating two pressures at once: the conservatory model that canonizes “the soloist,” and the broader audience that responds viscerally to pocket, texture, and repetition. Hunter is sketching a third path: music that honors jazz’s intelligence and risk, but communicates like a band, not a lecture.