Charlie Hunter Trio

A guitar dreamer adored by jazz heads and jam-band kids alike, Charlie Hunter might be the restless type when it comes to mixing styles but in this case the dream world he creates makes sense of the disparate, stripped-down sounds. Fusing elements of surf guitar ("Lady!”), ’60s six-string riffs and offbeat twang ("Speakers Built In,” "Wizard Sleeve”), Hunter bubbles up the kind of psychedelia-laced jazz stew perfect for late nights on a dark American highway, or at least the perilous one the listener might imagine when the likes of "Chimp Gut” hits the speakers. Even with his shaved-neck seven-string axe, his ghoulish themes ("Special Shirt”) and his watery reverb effects ("Mistico”), Hunter and company by and large manage to avoid the wank factor. Let the guitar man and his electric jive band float you away into the night, dig?