Remembering an acoustic artist

The acoustic guitar is easy to strum, but notoriously difficult to master. That didn't stop Jack Rose. After a decade of relentless touring and recording, the Philadelphia-based guitarist had quit his day job. And he had a new record coming out on one of the foremost independent labels in the country.

But he won't be around to enjoy the acclaim. Rose died of a heart attack Dec. 5 at age 38. His friends and colleagues will play concerts in his honor this weekend in Philadelphia and New York.

"It's completely a misfortune that we don't get to see how far he would've taken it," said Thurston Moore, cofounder of the indie rock band Sonic Youth, who often saw Rose perform live. "He was wonderful to watch, red-faced and sweating. There was nothing ever complacent or bored about his approach."

Another friend, the Boston guitarist Glenn Jones, said of Rose: "He was possibly the preeminent acoustic guitarist of his generation."

Rose (no relation to me) incorporated elements of blues, Indian music, and minimalist composition into his style. Always recorded live without overdubs, his playing moved easily between haunting melodies and complex, fingerpicked rhythmic patterns.

"It's not just his technical ability," said Bettina Richards, founder of Thrill Jockey Records, the Chicago label that will release Rose's posthumous record, Luck in the Valley, on Feb. 23. "His personality is infused into the music. It's so distinct, so individual," she said.

Much of Rose's inspiration came from music made before World War II, including country, blues, and ragtime.

"A lot of people, when they view old-time music, they view it as gentle or nostalgic, which I don't get at all," Rose told me several years ago in a series of interviews for public radio. "It was totally bizarre-sounding to me, and messed up. That's what attracted me to it: the strangeness of it."

Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, Va. His mother, an artist, runs a gallery; his father heads a telecom trade group in Washington. Rose started listening to acoustic country blues records as a kid. By high school, he'd moved to electric guitar - an early teacher advised him "that's where the money is" - and was playing in a local blues band. After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he majored in English, Rose joined the respected noise-rock band Pelt.

Rose's interest was drifting back to acoustic instruments when he discovered the music of John Fahey, father of the American primitive school of guitar playing, who also explored the connections between blues and Indian music. "I thought it was cool that he had a lot of different voices, a lot of different colors to paint with," Rose told me.

Shortly after moving to Philadelphia in 1998, Rose devoted himself to the acoustic guitar. "I hadn't played finger-style for like 15 years," he said. "I knew if I was going to be any good at it, I'd have to not work, and work on it exclusively."

It didn't hurt that he was collecting unemployment at the time, which allowed him to practice full-time for the better part of a year.

"A lot of people play American primitive, but he was really serious," said Byron Coley, a music writer from northwestern Massachusetts and a friend who met Rose during his days in Pelt. "Every time I'd see him, he'd improve a ridiculous amount."

Still, Rose constantly pushed himself to get better.

"He honed his craft daily," Rose's widow, Laurie Sutherland, said in an e-mail last week, "and put all of himself into it, like he did with everything he loved."

Rose told me he had a particularly difficult time learning to play the syncopated rhythms of ragtime. "You have to hear where the beats are," he said. "There've been a couple times I've gotten it right. But only I'll know that, if it sounds right to me."

Rose toured frequently, building a cult following around the United States and Britain. He released more than 10 solo records, often in limited editions of a few hundred copies each. Signing with Thrill Jockey suggested that Rose had reached a new stage in his career.

"That's a pretty big deal," said Coley. "He was like, oh man, I'll get to really tour!"

Richards, Thrill Jockey's founder, imagined new opportunities for Rose. "There's film [scoring] that I would have envisioned him being able to do," she said, along with performances for bigger crowds in larger venues.

While Rose was obliged to tour in order to earn a living, friends say he preferred the comforts of home. Around Philadelphia, he'd worked a succession of brief jobs, from Old City Coffee to Big Jar Books to Johnny Brenda's. He was a skilled chef who appreciated good food and drink, and was renowned among friends for making pizza in his home oven.

Even when he wasn't performing, Rose was a constant presence at local musical events. He was a voracious record collector who loved to talk about music and wasn't afraid to express his strong opinions. "There were plenty of things I disagreed with him on," said Jones, his friend. "But I always came away from Jack thinking about my own position more."

When it came to organizing memorial concerts, there was no shortage of support.

Brooke Sietinsons, of the Philadelphia band Espers, assembled a lineup for Saturday's show at the Latvian Society of Philadelphia that includes Moore, Jones, Meg Baird (her bandmate in Espers), and others. "All of the performers who were invited were close friends of Jack's," said Sietinsons, "and no one declined." If anything, she said, the list might be too long. "Jack always hated four-band bills, so I hope that he wouldn't find this lineup to be too terribly long-winded."

A second tribute concert is planned for Sunday at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a third show on Feb. 16, which would have been Rose's 39th birthday, in London.

His album, Luck in the Valley, comes out two weeks from today. While the circumstances surrounding its release are tragic, Richards hopes Rose's fans will listen to it in the spirit he would've wanted: "Go home, turn it up really loud, maybe have a nice bourbon, and enjoy it."