Ping Rose: All Roads Lead To and From the Blues (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

Quickly enough, though, Rose says that he was “course-corrected by some hardcore, old-school blues guys down in Memphis.” Thus equipped with a better sense of history and perspective, he redoubled his efforts in the blues. Going forward, he developed a keen ability to divine the blues sensibility in music outside the form. “I could listen to Smashing Pumpkins, Talking Heads, whatever,” he explains, “and I found that there was a blues element to a lot of it.”

As Rose continued to write in a blues style, he found that he could seamlessly weave in elements from outside the idiom while maintaining the blues quality at the music’s core. On Conjure Man, the result is a collection of songs informed by the blues but also drawing from styles that came after it. While “Should I” has a soulful feel that recalls Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway, “Salty” is classic twelve-bar blues with stinging, sinewy guitar licks.

Rose is adept on many instruments; on Conjure Man, he plays nearly everything himself. And his status as a multi-instrumentalist colors his approach to songwriting. He notes than in his current home in Nashville, there’s a very distinct singer-songwriter culture. “Many people write a song from a very guitar-strumming-centric place, and then it goes through rinse-wash-repeat cycles to become what you might hear on the radio or a playlist,” he says. “But that’s not the only way to write a song.”

Instead, Rose might begin writing a song using a keyboard lick or a bass riff, and build from there. The result is a set of songs that display more tone color and variety than might otherwise be the case. Yet when he draws inspiration from outside the blues, he still channels those ideas through a blues mindset.

Rose mentions Conjure Man’s “Don’t Drink Me Dry” as a useful example. “It’s a ‘90s hip hop beat mixed with a bit of B.B. King’s ‘Rock Me,’” he says. “Plus some ‘Born Under a Bad Sign.’” But the song itself was composed on piano, “so the guitar is the icing on the cake as opposed to the whole thing,” Rose explains.

For Rose, blues is the prism through which he views music. Yet he makes a studied effort to avoid being hemmed in by the form; he aims to apply modernity to the classic style. “These days,” he observes, “blues can be a sort of cosplaying thing, a bunch of tribute acts competing for the same attention. And I don’t want to do that.”

While Rose is thoroughly capable of playing complex and challenging jazz guitar lines, for his original music he counts simplicity as a core value. “With Conjure Man, I really wanted to make songs that people could get into easily,” he says. With a self-effacing laugh, he adds, “I want to keep people grounded while I’m going weedily-dee on guitar.”

As a child and young teen, Rose lived in Chattanooga. Asked about some of his proudest moments as a musician, he recalls a return visit last year to the city he calls his second hometown. “Somebody didn’t want to play their gig, so my booking agency got me onto this festival for the closing spot. I got to play for thousands of people, and up front were my friends from high school; we hadn’t seen each other for almost two decades.”

His classmates would have remembered him not as a blues guitarist, but as a teenage bassist in a hardcore punk band. Reintroduced to the grown-up Ping Rose, they were treated to the artistry of a musician who has traveled many paths and found the one that suits him best. “I got to throw down the songs from my new album,” he says. “And all of my friends got to see me do my thing with my band.”
Keeping with his eclectic musical mindset, Rose says that when it comes to music, the best advice he ever received came from a hip hop musician. “For many years, Khari Wynn was the guitarist for Public Enemy,” he explains. “I consider him one of the best guitarists in the world. And he told me, ‘All music sounds the same.’”

What Wynn meant was that if you like it, it’s good. And for Ping Rose, that’s license to draw from any corner of the musical landscape that resonates with him. When it comes to music, his core value is simple: “Open your mind. Listen to music,” he says.

“A lot of people think that knowing is the art of music,” he says. “And that’s a grave mistake. The art of music is listening.”