Jack Rose joined the dots within a miasmic musical landscape to create a distinctive guitar style. Stewart Gardiner spoke with the late artist back in 2004

Jack Rose makes modernist music in a world where modernism has been all but exorcised.

Modernism, as a means of artistic expression, emitted its frenzied death throes at the time of World War II, its final consumptive sputters brought on by the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. In suddenly realising that the heart of man was unfathomable in its capacity for evil, and had been since time immemorial, people turned their gaze away from history, adopting an almost cavalier attitude to what had gone before. Post-modernism would soon be born, and the arts could rest easy in the belief that they could continue to say something cleverly without ever having to say anything at all.

American popular guitar music was no exception. Its solution was to shake off its roots in traditional blues and adopt a revolving doors policy of stylistic reinvention, laying down the foundations of a musical year zero with rock’n’roll.

Jack Rose’s fascination with this almost mythological America before the point of crisis seeps through in his musical journeys towards that era. He weaves a rich tapestry of pre-war blues approximations that support his wholly distinctive personal style. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jack’s finger-picked guitar can function as an encyclopedic rendering of the past, but only if you dig beneath the surface. As in modernism, there may be a code available to crack, but the work itself is instinctively emotive even when shorn of reference points.

By no means a copyist, Jack Rose is engaged in recreating the impassioned skill and raw technicality that were once prevalent in American guitar music. But he does not take the easy route.

“No one today can play like Charley Patton, Blind Blake, John Hurt, Jimmie Rogers, Sam McGee, Blind Willie Johnson, and Jelly Roll Morton,” Jack informs me through that less-than-dusty information highway. Yet it was through attempting what he views as the impossible – hitting upon a particular way of playing seemingly lost to time – that he discovered his own inimitable voice.

Jack Rose joined Pelt alongside Patrick Best in the mid-Nineties, providing a catalyst that would see Mike Gangloff’s group evolve from the more straight-ahead rock into an entity charged with delving into the many possibilities of drawing out sounds through improvisation. The sepulchral drones of Técheöd (1998) and Empty Bell Ringing In The Sky (1999) gradually shifted into the more blues-based acoustic territory of Ayahuasca (2001), making it apparent that, at heart, theirs had always been a roots music. Jack now furthers this passage alone.

His recent Two Originals Of… collection on VHF Records draws together the hard-tofind LPs Red Horse, White Mule and Opium Musick. Coupled with the odds-and-ends compilation Raag Manifestos, they present a mesmerising journey of timeless folk music that gets you straight in the gut. Their generation-spanning vision is key to understanding Jack Rose’s output. “Music that’s any good has a blend of the past and present,” he says.

The past here is not only the era of pre-war American guitar music itself, but also the more recent past as refracted through the work of the late guitarist and composer John Fahey, that monolithic folk/blues renaissance man. However, Jack is comfortable with discussing his influence, as he speaks of eking out originality in a field that has been largely under the shadow of one man for so many years. In attempting to discover his own voice, he first had to force himself not to play in any style that’s directly associated with John Fahey. Now, he says, “I feel more comfortable with incorporating elements of his style into my playing/composing, now that I think I have internalised his music.”

Jack furthermore cites the inception of his creativity as coming from secondhand sources, disregarding his emotional surroundings as a direct influence: “I think atmosphere and where my head or heart is at the time certainly affects what I do, but I do not write about anything specific or get inspired by something in particular. If I am inspired, it’s usually from a raga, or a Fahey or [Robbie] Basho tune, or an old time melody. It’s mostly hard work, repetition, trial and error.”

It all comes down to living vicariously through music, for instead of that music simply reminding us of personal past events, we are allowed skewed access to the experience of others. By aiming to recreate a style lodged in time, Jack Rose is staking a claim for existing in a space that is less about the here and now, and more about the there and then.

Art is not born of a vacuum, despite what the solipsistic may claim, and to modernise is to build a path for the future from the stones of the past.

Asked what he wants listeners to take away from his work, Jack succinctly sets out his modus operandi: “I hope it leads them to the music that inspired me. I hope the listener can connect with his or her own emotions as well when listening to my music.”

Connecting is certainly something Jack Rose cannot fail to do. By joining the dots within the miasmic musical landscape, his work takes on moments of instinctive clarity that reveal shards of meaning to the listener and the artist alike. Windows creak open to worlds that bleed time through time, and let the blustering air of change rush through.

This article originally appeared in issue 2 of Plan B magazine (September/October 2004)

Stewart Gardiner
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