Rick Rosato: Homage
Rick Rosato

On the one hand, Homage is a typical pandemic-era release in featuring an artist performing sans accompaniment, in this case jazz bassist Rick Rosato. On the other, it's distinguished by its particular focus: the blues. Like many a NYC-based musician, Rosato was marooned at home for much of 2020 with no gigs to play and few studio sessions on the calendar. With time on his hands, he found himself listening to WKCR's 'Something Inside of Me,' a Saturday radio show dedicated to classic blues. Drawn into a world populated by seminal figures such as Skip James, Muddy Waters, and Mississippi John Hurt, Rosato decided to translate their Delta blues language into a solo bass format.

As he got further inside the music, the idea of recording the treatments began to gestate, taking him thereafter to Brooklyn's Bunker Studios in September 2021 to formally document what he'd created. Though he's a Montreal native who moved to Brooklyn in 2007, the jazz language he speaks and shares with others is steeped in the blues, which makes Homage an eloquent meditation on his music's roots. He brings his advanced facility to the material, his focus on capturing the essence of the piece in question as opposed to riffing indulgently on its changes. That said, there's no shortage of bass wizardry present, the dazzling runs within James's barrel-house “Cherry Ball Blues” an example. Few alterations were made to the bass for the recording aside from a few different tunings, used to achieve a deeper and more resonant sound, and some prepared piano-like treatments that involved placing mutes and objects around the strings and bridge.

Rosato's own “Homage” introduces the set, the clarity with which the performance has been captured as captivating as the expression itself. For four minutes, a vocal-like lead part wails passionately as a background pulse provides a solid grounding. Similar to the opener, Thelonious Monk's “Crepuscule with Nellie” receives a contemplative reading, and another jazz icon, Elvin Jones, is represented by the brief though nonetheless memorable “Elvin's Guitar Blues.” On three of the strongest cuts, Rosato digs hard into the slow crawl of James' “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” gives strong voice to the robust swing of Waters' “I Can't Be Satisfied,” and enlivens the release with the joyful bounce of Hurt's good-time “Boys, You're Welcome.”

October 2022