Hunter Roberts Is Bringing Blockbuster Musicians to Improv With Him at Knew Conscious

Hunter Roberts has spent a lot of his career backing up other musicians. Now he wants to bring improvised music to new audiences and tap into his own writing with his new series, Hunter Roberts' Knew Directions, at membership venue Knew Conscious.

“I play full-time,” says Roberts. “But a lot of it is sideman work. I’m a bass player, so I stay busy doing that. I wanted to use this as a platform to force myself to write and show people my voice.”

Knew Directions happens the third Wednesday of every month at Knew Conscious; the next installment is on Wednesday, October 19.

Roberts, who has played with Colorado electronic group Break Science and the newly formed BTTRFLY Quintet, to name a few, is bringing a quasi-revolving door of musical talent to each show. The Wednesday show will include Dominic Lalli of Big Gigantic on saxophone, Shane Endsley of Kneebody on trumpet, YouTube personality Charles Cornell on guitar and New York-based Colin Stranahan on drums.

Roberts says he has worked with Knew Conscious owner Kurt Redeker to get enough of a budget to bring in top-notch players. He even took a pay cut for the series in order to get the best musicians from around the country. It’s gone well so far. He describes the ensemble that played the September debut as “insane.”

“Ideally, I’ll have a few of the same players each time, so it’s not just relearning everything,” he says. “But I like the idea of a rotating cast. You get different timbres and different personalities who change the music.”

Roberts picked up his first bass as a thirteen-year-old so he could join a friend’s Van Halen cover band, and immediately fell in love with it. Bass isn’t usually the flashiest of instruments in a musical ensemble — and it takes a certain personality type to pursue it as a main instrument — but he has always found it to be a “humbly powerful instrument.”

“I realized through the years, growing up and playing in rock bands, that I would feel like no one was listening to me,” he says. “Then I would change something, and the entire band would change.”

Fat Mike of punk band NOFX says the job of a good bass player is to provide a round tone by which to make other people sound better. Knew Directions marks Roberts's first time as a bandleader, so he’s writing bass lines that will allow him to hold down a groove while the other musicians shine above it.

“That’s my job in the first place,” he says. “I like the idea of having bass lines that really hold together. Then people can feel comfortable expanding from that.”

Roberts prefers to call the music “improvised,” though most of the players could be easily categorized as jazz musicians, and many of them have studied jazz music in school. He balked at using “jazz” in the name of the show for numerous reasons. Roberts is white, and the music to first carry the name “jazz” originated in New Orleans more than a century ago with Black and Creole musicians and became an expansive Black American musical tradition. Whatever he is calling the show, Roberts makes it a point to honor the tradition and people who made the music that’s become such a big part of his personal and professional life and to be aware of where it came from.

“It’s paying respect that you know where the music comes from and how many people suffered for it,” he says. “But it’s also in conjunction with getting people out. I wanted something more mysterious that would draw people out.”

The term “jazz,” for better or worse, can also conjure thoughts of stale renditions of “I’ve Got Rhythm” being played as background music to indifferent audiences, and not being part of a vibrant and ongoing music scene that continues to evolve.

“Some people think that it’s archaic, like wax museum-type music," he says. "But it's changing, like everything else.”

The musicians Roberts is working with also draw from different musical traditions: funk, rock, hip-hop, progressive music and more. Whatever you want to call it, the sound is definitely improvisational, and sonically, it can swing from metal to soft love songs.

“I’ve had moments playing jazz that were more punk rock than a punk rock band I played in,” he says. “It touches on everything.”

Roberts wanted to bring the music to a younger crowd, and Knew Conscious seemed like the perfect venue for that mission.

“Miles Davis, in his book, he’s got a quote that’s pretty famous that he’s playing the modern rhythms, like rhythms that are happening now,” Roberts says. “If you listen to popular music, it’s not ’40s-era swing. You have trap music, hard rock. It depends on what you're into, but it’s staying present with what’s happening around you.”

Knew Directions, 9 p.m. Wednesday, October 19, Knew Conscious Collective, 2350 Lawrence Street. Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 the day of the show, which will also be livestreamed. A membership to the collective, which starts at $12 a month, is required to buy a ticket.