Dan Hunter

After the first years of learning chords and blues-riffs he became a member of different blues-rock bands in Germany. He learned to love the music of 80s rock virtuosos like Van Halen and Steve Vai and got excited listening to Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler. Finally he got totally addicted to bluesbased riffs and licks by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King and BB King. Wanting to improve his skills on guitar he started to study jazz and pop music in the Netherlands for 4 years.

Dan McCarthy’s Songs of the Doomed: “Some Jaded, Atavistic Freakout” is an album of (almost all original) music inspired by the writing of political journalist and general dingbat Hunter S. Thompson. A lot of the jangled madness that makes up this band’s repertoire comes from a new compositional style created specifically for this band called the ‘Gonzo Cypher’. The cypher allows you to take a word, phrase, or even paragraph of Hunter’s writing, submit it to the cypher, and what you are left with is a weird and likely obnoxious ‘tone row’, which is then used to compose the music - serial music rules apply.

SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree is the highly anticipated followup to the 2021 GRAMMY nominated eponymous album, by genre-bending trailblazers Kurt Elling & Charlie Hunter. Joining forces with multi-instrumentalist duo drummer Corey Fonville and bassist-keyboardist DJ Harrison (of Richmond, VA-based jazz-funk fusion quintet Butcher Brown) for a kaleidoscopic collection of new songs, surprising covers, and dynamic reinventions, these are all animated by crafty production, crack musicianship, and Elling’s instantly identifiable vocal prowess. If the first album was a somewhat radical departure for Elling, SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree is more of an exquisite progression upon the template.