Dr. Ragtime & His Pals (Vinyl)
Barcode: 711574797813
John Coltrane died at age 40, and in retrospect it seems as if the intensity of activity in his last years, the sheer torrent of notes, was an attempt at purging the music from his soul before it was too late. The guitarist Jack Rose died at 38, in 2009, and listening back to his catalog one has a similar notion. Like Coltrane, Jack Roses last years were marked by a shimmering intensity, an outpouring of his spirit, onto audiences and records. I believe Jack Rose felt the duty of preservation but was by no means bound by it. With his virtuoso fingerstyle technique and restless guitar explorations--modal epics, bottleneck laments, uptempo rags--its easy to hear a connection to tradition and at the same time a pulsing modernism: Ancient to the Future in the words of Chicagos Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Ultimately, its no use attempting to explain the unexplainable (natural disasters, God, art, death). As the air gets heavy before a thunderstorm, Jack Roses vivid guitar picking awakes in us a peculiar awareness, something ancient and American. Jack Roses work exists along the established continuum of American vernacular music: gospel, early jazz, folk, country blues and up through the post-1960s American primitive family tree from John Fahey and Robbie Basho and outward to other idiosyncratic American musicians like Albert Ayler, the NoNeck Blues Band, Captain Beefheart and Cecil Taylor. His process can best be heard as an evolution; renditions of songs would transform over time, worked out live, with changes in duration, tempo or attack, in the search for a songs essence. The album known as Self-Titled was originally released in 2006 on the arCHIVE label, and later reissued as a CD two-fer with Dr. Ragtime and His Pals. It contains a combination of studio and live recordings. Self-Titled is marked by a sense of forward momentum, the result of several years of constant playing, with fresh versions of a number of previously attempted songs. Blind Willie Johnsons spiritual Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground is manipulated into a wailing slideguitar lament. Levee pops like a warning. St. Louis Blues (in this and its several other incarnations across his entire catalog) is a good example of Jacks innate sense of swing, a crucial characteristic of his playing perhaps lost on some of his fingerpicking followers. The centerpiece of the album, however, is the nearly sidelong Spirits in the House, which begins with tentative weeping glissandos, and slowly reveals itself as a stately fingerpicked blues meditation. Jack Rose was a larger than life man with a hearty spirit--a no-bullshit gentleman--and his death continues to reverberate among the community of musicians and music people he called friends. This spirit, as evidenced within his recorded output, has proven to be indomitable and continually vital.
- Internal ID: JITRE
- Released: 9/16/16
- Format Detail: LP 140g tip-on Stoughton cover w/ DL
- Format: Vinyl
- Genre: Rock
