Combining a jazz-infused guitar-meets-vocal vamping style with an indie-rock approach, Rosie Frater-Taylor is like no other guitarist today.
BY ELLIE ROGERS
IT’S A BOLD claim, but one that we’re prepared to make: There is no guitarist in the U.K. right now who sounds quite like Rosie Frater-Taylor. Brought up in a musical household, with a jazz drummer father and a jazz singer mother, the rapidly rising young Londoner specializes in combining accessible songcraft with wicked jazz-infused guitar chops as she blurs the boundaries between rock, alt-pop, neo-soul, new-school jazz and folk.
Having first picked up a guitar at a very young age, Rosie possesses an innate kind of connection to her instrument that often manifests itself as a tendency to sing or scat along in unison with the improvised melodies that come flowing out of her fingertips. A technique originally born out of necessity (she used to need to hum lines aloud in order to find them on the fretboard), it’s developed into a trademark style that never fails to turn heads. It even won her a high-profile fan in the form of Jimmy Page, who once caught a solo performance of Rosie’s at the Troubadour and felt compelled to personally congratulate her on her impressive skills.
“He was just saying all this nice stuff,” she recalls, still in slight disbelief over the encounter, which occurred some years ago now. “It’d be funny to meet him again and actually have a proper conversation about songwriting and guitar playing,” she says, with a smile. “But he’s probably very busy!”
Since then, Rosie has amassed well over three million streams on Spotify, further refined her signature guitar-meets-vocal vamping style and even given lessons on the topic for the online guitar instruction site Pickup Music. “It’s just become a part of my tone and my playing,” she says casually. “People seem to resonate with it. I’m a big George Benson fan. He does it as well, and I really like the way it makes your lines sound, because it changes your focus — not that I even think consciously about it anymore, to be honest.”
Although she claims not to have perfect pitch, Rosie theorizes that, through the sheer number of practice hours she’s put in over the years, she typically knows how the notes are going to sound before she frets them, and that’s what enables her enviably free-flowing style.
“The thing I love to do when I solo is to take a line and do as much with it as I pos
