I’m utterly incapable of wrapping my head around the fact that Jack Rose is gone. The guitarist passed away -- at his home in Philadelphia, from an apparent heart attack -- on the very day I was putting together Rhapsody’s Best Roots Albums of the Decade list. Rose is, of course, on it. His 2005 masterwork, Kensington Blues, sits at No. 5. This was not even two weeks ago: Saturday, December 5, 2009. In that time, Rose’s music has laid claim to my ears almost exclusively. Then again, it's not as if I just discovered Jack Rose. I’ve been obsessing over his music for most of the decade. In addition to spinning Kensington Blues and a slew of other solo joints, there’s his work with underground drone-masters Pelt (the version of “Calais to Dover” on Bestio Tergum Degero is such a mind-bending opus) and the brand-new Jack Rose & the Black Twig Pickers album, the exquisite offspring of his collaboration with one of southwest Virginia’s finest old-time revival acts.Rose wasn’t famous. He was revered, yes. But famous? No. Chances are a lot folks reading this blog have never even heard of the guy. For the uninitiated, he was -- and I’m not being overly dramatic when I say this -- one of the greatest American instrumentalists of the modern era. His masterful fingerpicking built upon the progressive-folk tradition that heavies like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Sandy Bull, Davy Graham, Peter Walker and even a young Leo Kottke originally established in the 1960s and ’70s. We’re talking about a single man, climbing onstage with just his guitar and nothing else, and creating glorious, richly textured compositions that you wouldn’t even think possible from such a stripped-down setup.
Interestingly enough, Rose hated the word “tradition.” Yes, he worked
with folk forms whose roots pierced history’s thick ether: old-time,
country blues, Piedmont blues, ragtime, even Indian raga. And yes, he
spent countless hours studying the likes of Fahey and Basho. But what
he took from them more than anything was their maverick ethos. Over the
last two decades Rose produced an oeuvre that was large and sprawling
enough to include everything from the simplest of folk melodies to
hard, noise-drenched psychedelia. Possessing a deep love for
exploration, the dude more or less swallowed entire galaxies of sound.
It’s amazing, really.
But what was even more impressive was how he fused all these disparate elements into a unified vision. Vision is key when talking about Jack Rose. I know that word has been utterly corrupted (as in "McCrystal's vision for Afghanistan is ... "). Yet it's true. In an era when music has fractured into countless micro-genres, Rose was that rare artist who looked to create the grand statement, something that transcends the fractured, day-to-day muddle of it all. I think that's the one thing I've always admired most about the man. It's a strange thing to say, but listening to Rose's epic music -- with the way it merged stone-cold cosmic wanderlust and a genuine love for home, earth and roots -- gave me hope that humans hadn't lost the ability to create something universal, that we hadn't totally agreed to crawl into lonely, little caves and refuse to dream of things bigger and better.
A friend of Jack's, Elisa Ambrogio of the group Magik Markers, recently posted a touching eulogy over at the Arthur blog that totally nailed what I'm now fumbling to describe:
You could play anyone Jack’s music and they could hear how incredible he was, my father could hear it, room mates who mostly hated what I listened to; there was no context necessary, no set of presumed references: people just knew they were hearing something singular and perfect.
So right on.
R.I.P. Dr. Ragtime
P.S. I put together a memorial playlist for Mr. Jack Rose. Whether you're a fan or a newbie, I think you'll dig it. Check it out, or sample it below.
But what was even more impressive was how he fused all these disparate elements into a unified vision. Vision is key when talking about Jack Rose. I know that word has been utterly corrupted (as in "McCrystal's vision for Afghanistan is ... "). Yet it's true. In an era when music has fractured into countless micro-genres, Rose was that rare artist who looked to create the grand statement, something that transcends the fractured, day-to-day muddle of it all. I think that's the one thing I've always admired most about the man. It's a strange thing to say, but listening to Rose's epic music -- with the way it merged stone-cold cosmic wanderlust and a genuine love for home, earth and roots -- gave me hope that humans hadn't lost the ability to create something universal, that we hadn't totally agreed to crawl into lonely, little caves and refuse to dream of things bigger and better.
A friend of Jack's, Elisa Ambrogio of the group Magik Markers, recently posted a touching eulogy over at the Arthur blog that totally nailed what I'm now fumbling to describe:
You could play anyone Jack’s music and they could hear how incredible he was, my father could hear it, room mates who mostly hated what I listened to; there was no context necessary, no set of presumed references: people just knew they were hearing something singular and perfect.
So right on.
R.I.P. Dr. Ragtime
P.S. I put together a memorial playlist for Mr. Jack Rose. Whether you're a fan or a newbie, I think you'll dig it. Check it out, or sample it below.
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100% beautiful and very very sweet!