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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 catalogue one has a similar notion.

Like Coltrane, Jack Rose's last years were marked by a shimmering intensity, an outpouring of his spirit, onto audiences and records. With his virtuoso finger-style 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. 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 NoNeck Blues Band, Captain Beefheart, and Cecil Taylor.

TRACK LISTING

Miss May's Place
Revolt
Bells
Knoxville Blues
Soft Steel Piston
Linden Avenue Stomp
Blessed Be The Name Of The Lord
Walkin' Blues
Buckdancer's Choice