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REAL ACOUSTIC ROCK

Guitarist, percussionist, and vocalist Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers has been writing and playing original songs since he was a teenager. Along the way he has performed at San Francisco clubs with the quartet Heavy Wood, released the solo CD Traveling Songs, scored a rock musical...and played tabla in a TV commercial in India.

Rodgers grew up loving, on the one hand, the emotional depth of Neil Young songs and the heavenly harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel; and on the other, the joyous grooves of Stevie Wonder and the improvisational excursions of the Grateful Dead. His own songs draw from all these wells of American music, with a writer's eye for detail in the lyrics and masterful rock-band-in-a-box guitar work. His solo show mixes originals with inventive covers from the Beatles to Tom Waits, Chris Whitley to Gillian Welch. Rodgers' latest solo CD is Humming My Way Back Home.

He lives outside Syracuse, New York, where he hosts the monthly Words and Music Songwriter Showcase. In addition to performing he reports on the music scene for NPR's All Things Considered and Acoustic Guitar magazine.

FAST FACTS

Yes, Pepper is his real middle name--it's the last name of Rodgers' great uncle. In sixth grade, Rodgers failed in a campaign to get classmates to call him Pepper. When he began writing professionally after college, he decided to use his full name and asked his editor at the San Francisco Chronicle to change his byline. She nixed the idea at first, preferring the casual Jeff Rodgers, but at the time he happened to be writing a review of a book by Joyce Carol Oates. So Rodgers told her fine, he'd go by Jeff Rodgers as long as the review said the book was by Joyce Oates. She laughed and relented, and he's been Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers ever since.

Rodgers started performing in New Jersey bars with his brother, Andy (currently with the Middle-East-meets-West band RoofTop Four), long before he was old enough to be allowed in the door. When Rodgers was around 15, he and his brother shared their original songs with producer and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye at his New York studio. (Kaye warned against getting pigeonholed as folkies and commented that the teenage brothers--unlike many people he knew in the rock 'n' roll business--actually knew how to play their instruments.)

Rodgers studied north Indian tabla drumming both in the U.S., at the famed Ali Akbar College of Music, and in India. In performance, he draws on this training in several original songs accompanied only by frame drum or kanjira, a tambourine-like Indian instrument. He has spent several long stints in south India with his wife, an anthropologist and South Asia specialist, and their children.

He plays a guitar custom-made by luthier Linda Manzer, builder of Bruce Cockburn's and Pat Metheny's acoustic guitars. The guitar's headstock inlay is inspired by kolams, a form of Indian folk art. Each morning, many south Indian women create these beautiful symmetrical patterns with white rice flour on their doorsteps.

Rodgers' experiences as a guitarist and songwriter have shaped his work as a music journalist and author. He has published groundbreaking interviews with Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Ani DiFranco, Dave Matthews, and many other artists. Ten of these conversations were collected in the book Rock Troubadours.