Manafonistas

„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–it’s easy to hear a connection to tradition and at the same time a pulsing modernism: “ancient to the future” in the words of chicago’s association for the advancement of creative musicians. ultimately, it’s no use attempting to explain the unexplainable (natural disasters, god, art, death). as the air gets heavy before a thunderstorm, jack rose’s vivid guitar picking awakes in us a peculiar awareness, something ancient and american. jack rose’s 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 no-neck 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 song’s essence.“

(Three Lobed Recordings MHQ)