Ping Rose: All Roads Lead To and From the Blues (Part 1 of 2)

Many artists start in one musical style and continue with it through their entire career. Nashville-based guitarist, singer and songwriter Ping Rose has traveled a more nuanced path. But his journey – through punk, country, jazz, classical and pop, with stops along the way in a music conservatory, cruise ships gigs and dive-bar club dates – eventually led him back to the source, back to the blues. His new album, Conjure Man is a fully-formed musical statement of purpose that folds in soul, r&b and rock but wraps it all in the blues. And it marks a major departure from his previous effort, 2020’s Sketchbook.

When Ping Rose put together his debut album, he pointedly chose its title. Calling it Sketchbook made sense: in many ways, the album presented a collection of musical ideas that felt developmental: solid and appealing, but ultimately the work of an artist who hadn’t quite settled upon a distinct musical character. Released in 2020 but in fact made nearly a decade ago, Sketchbook would only hint at the direction Rose would eventually pursue.

“Sketchbook was really a very old album [of songs] that I just didn’t want to waste,” Rose explains. “So I put it out in anticipation, to keep going.” At that point in his musical journey, Rose already had an impressively wide set of experiences upon which to build. His back story includes a jazz and classical conservatory education and years spent backing country musicians. “I had a scholarship to play guitar, but I wasn’t a music major,” he explains. Rose found himself playing “every kind of worship music imaginable,” he says: black gospel, contemporary Christian, southern gospel, bluegrass. “That was my job to earn my scholarship.”

His studies focused in part on the business side of music, an education that served him well when a major label came calling. “I was offered a deal at Capitol more than a decade ago,” he says. “But I rejected it.” Rose explains that the offer was “worse than a 360 deal,” a common arrangement in which a label offers financial support in return for a larger cut of all of the artist’s revenue streams; such a deal gives the label a piece of the profits for everything from album sales to merchandise, songwriting royalties and endorsement deals. Like many artists, Rose views that kind of arrangement as antithetical to creativity. That helps explain why Conjure Man is an independent release.

Yet Rose’s foundation as a savvy, business-minded musician is only one piece of the puzzle. At his core, he’s a musician and songwriter completely at home in the blues. “I’m from Memphis,” he emphasizes. “I grew up playing on Beale Street. My real foundation has always been blues.”

Rose put that foundation to work upon finishing his studies; his first job out of school was in the B.B. King Club Room on three successive cruise ship tours. “The way that worked was that we had to play Just Like the Record,” he explains. “Not karaoke machine style, not ‘fake book’ stuff. No charts.” The music had to sound right, and it had to sound good.

Conjure Man continues to support those values. But the album uses blues as its bedrock, incorporating other styles to support Rose’s artistry, not to dilute or distract from his blues sensibility. With the sequencing of the album’s tracks, he boldly stakes out territory as a serious player. The record opens with “Cloverhill Stomp,” an instrumental showcasing his dexterity on steely slide guitar.

“I have this duality,” Rose explains. “I’m both a singer and musician, separate from the singer-songwriter concept.” Asked to name some of his guitar-playing inspirations, he ticks off names that aren’t always mentioned in the same breath: B.B. King, Jerry Reed, Ry Cooder, Wes Montgomery, Robert Randolph, George Benson, Al DiMeola and Jimmy Herring, to name a few. And his playing style reflects that omnivorous approach. “I can throw some really heavy country chicken-pickin’ into the pot along with some dirty slide and Mississippi blues,” he says.

Rose’s melodic sense brings those potentially disparate styles together in a unified manner on Conjure Man. As a kid growing up in Memphis, he was into the tuneful side of pop music. “I was into Michael Jackson and Prince,” he says. “On guitar I was playing System of a Down; I was heavily into rock.” He found a way into the blues through the music of Jimi Hendrix, and applied his technical mastery to that style. He laughs at that memory of his younger self: “I was like, ‘I know a blues scale. I can play anything!’”

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