VA: Ten Years Gone: A Tribute to Jack Rose
Tompkins Square
This Jack Rose (1971-2009) tribute isn't a collection of covers, as such sets typically are, but instead original instrumentals created in his honour by friends of his and others inspired by his music. Regardless, the material accomplishes what the best tributes do: makes the listener eager to revisit the honouree's catalogue to drink from the original well. Ten years have passed since Rose's passing (at thirty-eight of an apparent heart attack), making it as good a time as ever to bring the American guitarist back into the public eye.
Given that Rose's name often surfaces when the conversation turns to American ‘primitive' guitarists such as John Fahey and Robbie Basho, one would presume Ten Years Gone to be chock-full of solo acoustic guitar exercises, and on that count one wouldn't be wrong. It also, however, includes instrumentals performed on cello and fiddle, which broadens the recording's musical scope. Thoughtfully curated by Buck Curran (of Arborea renown) and issued on Tompkins Square, a label known for its American Primitive Guitar releases, the collection is a fitting tribute to an artist who obviously left us too soon.
Mike Gangloff, like Rose a Pelt member, introduces the set with the fiddle meditation “The Other Side of Catawba,” after which Nick Schillace presents the first of many lustrous fingerpicking workouts, this one an uptempo, multi-hued sparkler called “A King's Head” that gallops with fervent determination. Similarly aggressive in attack is Joseph Allred's “Dr. Ragtime in the House of Death,” five dizzying minutes of lilting swirl, while “By Any Other Name” presents as arresting an exercise in fingerpicking artistry as one would expect from Sir Richard Bishop.
Acoustic guitarist Micah Blue Smaldone impresses with “Winghold,” a melodically strong reverie that plays like a mournful short story distilled into song. Andy McLeod's aptly titled “Open Water” sounds as if it was recorded by an outdoors stream, the soft murmur of flowing water an effective backdrop to the guitarist's spacious strums, plucks, and picking. In contrast to the mystical character of William Sol's epic Prana Crafter exploration “High Country Dynamo,” Helen Espvall opts for raw, expressive outpourings in her cello piece “Alcantara,” and guitarist Mariano Rodriguez does much the same in his psych-drone exercise “Raga for Dr. Ragtime.”
On the bluesier tip is Curran's “Greenfields of America (Spiritual for Jack Rose),” a reverb-heavy evocation marked by tremolo and slide shudder, and Simone Romei's “Hawksbill Mountain Blues,” a good-time blues-folk romp through the open hills. As spirited as Romei's is Matt Sowell's breezy “Schuylkill River Rag,” and contributions also come from Paolo Laboule Novellino (“Spiriti e Scheletri”) and Madrid-based guitarist Isasa (“Saeta de la calle Mozart”). One of the byproducts of a tribute project such as this is that it helps draw attention to musicians building on the legacies of Fahey, Rose, and Basho with their own voices. Along with artists whose names are familiar (Bishop, Espvall, Gangloff), Ten Years Gone will likely introduce listeners to figures they're hearing for the first time and whose material they'll want to seek out after absorbing the compilation.December 2019