Jack Rose, Patrick Best: Last-minute show this Saturday... Spread the word

by nf, 19 Sep 12:07

THIS SATURDAY, Sept. 22 @ 8 p.m.: JACK ROSE, GLENN JONES, PATRICK BEST, TBA? -- Several hours of captivating and uplifting acoustic music, brought to you by Skulls of Heaven and Front Porch Productions. Music starts at 9 p.m., cookout at 6:30 p.m. (weather permitting) @ THE TOMB, 2310 Pennsylvania, Madison WI (entance around back behind the building).

Some info, in case you don't know these folks (ed. note: ahem, what are you doing on this site if you don't!?):

JACK ROSE (links here to VHF Records, Pitchfork Media, and more) joined the legendary drone/noise/folk group Pelt in 1995. Pelt along with Tower Recordings, UN, Charalambides was one of the early groups who forged a new sound that combined free improv, drone, traditional folk music in the early to mid-nineties. Since 2001 Rose has pursued his own path in the solo acoustic guitar solo genre as invented by John Fahey. Like Fahey, Rose draws his inspiration from early rural American musicians like Charley Patton, Skip James and Blind Blake. He also gleans inspiration from Robbie Basho, Ry Cooder, Zia M. Dagar, La Monte Young, Terry Riley and more. Jack incorporates all of these elements into his own idiosyncratic style and it is his sound and his alone.

GLENN JONES since 1989 has led Boston's "avant -garage" instrumental rock band, Cul de Sac, whose musical adventures are documented on nine albums to date, including a soundtrack for cult-director Roger Corman (The Strangler's Wife, 2003), and collaborations with guitarist John Fahey (The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, 1996) and former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (Abhayamudra, 2004). In 2001, Glenn began playing acoustic guitar in earnest after not touching it in more than a decade, and both Cul de Sac's The Strangler's Wife and the rapturously received Death of the Sun (2003) have featured as much of his acoustic guitar as his electric. A 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called "Takoma school," Jones has written extensively on the steel-string guitar's leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones during the five years before his untimely death in1986. With former Takoma label guitarists Peter Lang and Michael Gulezian -- along with Loren Mazzacane Connors, Henry Kaiser, Gary Lucas, Tony Conrad and others -- Jones performed at sold-out concerts honoring John Fahey, in NYC and San Francisco, shortly after Fahey's death in 2001. As interest in the "old guard" -- Fahey, Basho, Lang and others -- has grown, a new fraternity of "guitar soli" tunesmiths has come to the fore, artists whose reason for playing is exploration, communication and expression -- not to show off their chops, display flashy technique, nor to create sonic wallpaper. In 2004, Jones stepped out of the long shadow cast by Takoma's guitar visionaries and offered his own "new possibility" -- This Is the Wind That Blows It Out -- for Strange Attractors Audio House. In the spirit of the great Takoma Records releases of the '60s and early '70s, This is the Wind that Blows it Out wends its way through a varied stylistic terrain, charting its own unique course. "American Primitive," blues, rustic Mississippi Delta slide and classical forms cozy up fluently to one another, sometimes within the same tune. Jones' fingerstyle and slide technique is on dazzling display, guiding the music across scenic vistas of mood and color. Its release was followed by a month-long tour of Europe with guitarist Jack Rose. In the year since, Jones has shared bills with Berlin-based Steffen Basho-Junghans, Max Ochs, Matt Valentine / Erika Elder; he's toured with Peter Lang, and with some of the best of the new breed of solo guitar upstarts: Harris Newman, Sean Smith, and James Blackshaw. Jones contributed a track to the widely-praised guitar anthology, Imaginational Anthem, issued by Tompkins Square Records in 2005, and his second solo guitar album -- titled Against Which the Sea Continually Beats — was issued by Strange Attractors in February 2007.

Multi-instrumentalist PATRICK BEST has logged a dozen years and counting in Pelt, and had brief stints long ago in the SST jazz band Hotel X (where he got to play with Bern Nix, among others) and (with Jack Rose) in Richmond aggro-scuzz-rock unit Ugly Head. Known most recently for his work with voice, harmonium, porta-cello and bass, Patrick just issued his first solo release, a long track on the Bound With Skin comp. This is a rare chance to catch Patrick in solo performance.