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Music

Soul swinger

JAMES HUNTER at Supermarket (268 Augusta), Wednesday (April 12), 9 pm. $15. 416-840-0501. www.ticketweb.com. Rating: NNNNN


At a time when it’s fashionable for artists to pretend it’s 1982, James Hunter’s attempt to turn the clocks back 20 years further with his just-released old-school R&B set, People Gonna Talk (Rounder), might not have been a commercially savvy move.

Then again, if the blue-eyed soul man were in the music business to retire wealthy, he’d probably be in publishing.

“What music being made today doesn’t owe a heavy debt to the past?” shoots back Hunter over his cellphone. “Most popular music I hear now hasn’t moved past the 80s, and if you ask me, that’s a bad place to stop. I grew up on a steady diet of R&B, and those early 60s recordings by guys like Clyde McPhatter and Marv Johnson really did it for me. I’m just playing the melodies and grooves that I like and putting my own stamp on the sound with the songs that I write.”

It takes balls for a skinny guitar-playing bloke from Colchester to try to write songs like Sam Cooke and sing them like Jackie Wilson while attempting to bend strings like the 5 Royales’ Lowman Pauling, and Hunter’s got brass ones. That’s a big part of the reason he came to be known as Van Morrison’s sideman guitarist of choice.

When Morrison, knocked out by Hunter’s chops at a gig in Wales, asked if he’d care to come along on tour, Hunter told him straight up that he wasn’t overly familiar with his work and actually preferred the stuff coming out of Motown for home listening. That was good enough for Morrison to want to hire him on the spot.

“He’d much rather work with people who are inspired by the same artists who inspired him. The last thing Van wants to talk about are his own recordings, which was fine by me because I didn’t know much about them.”

But they both know a lot about those by Bobby Bland and Sam Cooke, so they had a lot to talk about.

“I took him on a tour of the record shops in Camden once and made him buy a 5 Royales record. It didn’t seem like he was familiar with them, so I made sure he didn’t leave without it. And he returned the favour… well, sort of. He gave me this tape of songs he was thinking about covering, and there was a great version of I’ll Never Be Free, only he didn’t bother to write out a track list. So I can say that he did turn me on to a wonderful unknown singer.”

Hunter also appears to have hit it off with White Stripes producer Liam Watson, who did him the honour of using Watson’s coveted AKG C12 microphone for his vocals during the recording of People Gonna Talk at Toe Rag Studios. Whether it was the sound of the room, the vintage equipment or Watson’s studio smarts, or all of the above, it worked. Listening to the album, you get the feeling that he’s sitting in your living room with some mates, running through a few new tunes he’s just written.

“When I was going to do my first album, Believe What I Say, for Ace 10 years ago, I really wanted to have Liam produce it, but back then he wasn’t expensive enough for the people at the label to take him seriously. So we wound up demoing the songs with Liam and recording the album with someone else, which is very unfortunate, because I could’ve been sounding much better a lot sooner.

“Liam’s take on recording a band is that what you don’t do is more important. When I asked him if there was a reason why he had the two saxophonists record their parts together with just one microphone between them, he replied, ‘Yes, there is a reason.’ He wouldn’t elaborate any further.”

The lesson here is that making records that sound great is much easier when you have a talented singer/songwriter like Hunter, a group of talented musicians and a producer who’s wise enough to put them all in one room together and just let them play.

“It might sound like a more difficult way of working, but it was actually a lot easier for me because it’s exactly what I do onstage every night,” explains Hunter. “The problem many people had with my previous recordings was that they didn’t sound much like my live performances, and this time I think we’ve cracked it.”

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