In the early 2000s, while still a member of avant-drone group Pelt, Jack Rose found himself unemployed. Hunkering down at home with his acoustic guitar, he returned to the country blues he had abandoned years before when a teacher told him it wasn't worth trying if he couldn't sing. Woodshedding diligently, Rose became a masterful finger-style player, adept at bluegrass, ragtime, pre-war folk, Indian ragas, and more-- and started a solo career that would eventually make other employment unnecessary.
His timing was fortuitous. The 1990s/2000s resurgence of John Fahey as an underground guitar hero inspired reams of skilled new players, including Glenn Jones, Ben Chasny, Harris Newman, James Blackshaw, and Nick Schillace. Rose became one of the de facto leaders of this loose movement, and his music seemed to grow and expand because of the company, or perhaps the competition. Each subsequent solo album revealed advances in technique and imagination, culminating in 2005's wide-ranging Kensington Blues.
Rose also toured and collaborated more frequently as the decade progressed, sharing space and sounds with everyone from Mogwai to British folk legend Michael Chapman to Black Twig Pickers, a bluegrass offshoot of Pelt. That's why the shock of his sudden death last December at age 38 was so resonant, rippling through the many corners of underground music he had visited. That shock is even more palpable now that his final album, Luck in the Valley, has been released. It's a big, bold work, just the way Rose was a big, bold guy-- confident, honest, and forthright, sometimes to a fault, but always with huge heart.
This forceful poise is what distinguished him from his predecessors and peers. Though his playing was often intricate and subtle, it was never hesitant, always supremely assured. And Luck in particular was intended to be big. As Rose told Foxy Digitalis in 2007, "Kensington Blues is a really hard record to live up to. So [the next one]'s just gotta be really good." Indeed, he outdid himself-- Luck isn't just good, it's great. And it makes the stunning silence of his absence, already as large as his burly persona, feel even larger.
Luck's size comes from the diversity of its sounds and the wealth of its partnerships. Rose winds through a range of instrumentation and lineups, adding the braying fiddle of Mike Gangloff (of Pelt and Black Twig Pickers) to the hoe-down of "Lick Mountain Ramble", the downbeat banjo of Glenn Jones to the wistful "Moon in the Gutter", the ragtime piano of Hans Chew to the woozy waltz of W.C. Handy's classic "St. Louis Blues". But the jumps in style and context never jar, making the album less like a compendium then a suite of related themes. Many ideas and moods make up those themes, but the one that stands out most is joy. Rose injects a celebratory energy into every note, so even the most wistful moments-- my favorite is his poignant slide guitar on "Woodpiles on the Side of the Road"-- sound excited by the mere fact of their own existence.
Of course, it's easy to see the work of those no longer with us through a sentimental prism, letting emotion bleed over into the perceived profundity of the music. But Luck in the Valley is so vibrant, engaging, and alive, it's hard to overestimate it. In fact, we've been robbed of how much greater it would sound if we could look forward to Rose playing these songs live, or building on them tomorrow the way he did yesterday. But no matter what the past has taken or the future holds, this is simply great music from a great musician. That, luckily, is something that neither life nor death can change.
