Bert Jansch- S/T (1965) / It Don't Bother Me (1965) / Jack Orion (1966) MP3 & FLAC -Rest in Peace-

"No girl I've loved has ever held me down. No reason can I give for leaving this town. My love is true now, my love is true, but the road is long; I've got to see my journey through."

One of the most important figures to emerge from the British Folk movement of the sixties and early seventies, Bert Jansch was unparalleled in his combination of technical virtuosity, eclectic influences and brilliant compositional skills. As former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has suggested, Jansch's considerable influence extends well beyond the folk music genre that he so profoundly transformed: "He completely reinvented guitar playing and set a standard that is still unequaled today. Without Bert Jansch, rock music as it developed in the '60s and '70s would have been very different. You hear him in Nick Drake, Pete Townsend, Donovan, The Beatles, Jimmy Page, and Neil Young." As a teenager in mid-fifties Edinburgh, Jansch quickly developed his love and knowledge of Folk music by hanging around a local club called The Howff (Gaelic for "meeting place") that featured local Folk musicians, and it was here that he made a fateful connection. Jansch: "A school friend had said there was a pub up the high street in Edinburgh and that I should check it out because he knows I was interested in the guitar. We both went up there and we took lessons from a girl called Jill Doyle. Fortunately for me she was the sister of Davey Graham, who is my all-time hero when it comes to the guitar. So, I mean from that point on, I sort of bypassed The Beatles and all that." Eventually, after having decided that music was his true calling, Jansch quit his day job as a nurseryman and entered a two-year period where slept on the couches of various friends and acquaintances by day and played an endless string of one night stands on the British folk club scene by night. This experience served as his musical apprenticeship, as he met and learned from many seminal British folk musicians along the way, such as Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy and Anne Briggs.

Davey Graham

No one influenced Jansch's quickly evolving technical prowess on guitar as much as Davey graham, a prodigiously talented musician whose virtuosity on the acoustic guitar was only matched by his infamously mercurial nature; for example, there is an often-told anecdote about how, sometime during the late sixties, Graham was on a flight to Australia where he was booked for a tour; evidently, the flight had a one hour layover in Bombay, during which Graham spontaneously decided to abandon the tour in order to go on a six month walkabout through India. Graham's unquenchable thirst for exploring different cultures and absorbing elements of their folk traditions into his guitar playing rubbed off on the young Jansch; from 1963-1965, in emulation of his idol, Jansch traveled abroad in order to live the life of a busker, hitchhiking from town to town and country to country, finally ending up in Tangiers, where he was repatriated back to England after coming down with dysentery.  However, after returning to London where there was a burgeoning Folk music scene, Jansch's fortunes took a turn for the better, as he soon met Bill Leader, an engineer and producer who helped Jansch make the home reel-to-reel recordings that would comprise his first album. In addition, London provided Jansch with a community of innovative Folk guitarists, such as his idol Davey Graham and John Renbourn, who welcomed him into their ranks.

Bert Jansch in the mid-sixties

Recorded in Jansch's apartment using a single microphone and several borrowed guitars (amazingly, he didn't even own an instrument at this point), Bert Jansch, released in 1965 on a small Folk label called Transatlantic, instantaneously catapulted its creator into the forefront of the London Folk scene, a rarity among Folk albums in the sense that it was comprised mostly of original material, which inevitably saddled Jansch with the troublesome "next Bob Dylan" moniker until, a short time later, the title was handed over to Donovan, who, ironically covered a number of Jansch's songs. Despite such reductive labels, the album was nothing less than a game-changer due to Jansch's deft and dynamic finger-style technique and his already-advanced song-writing ability; its influence was felt far and wide, as Neil Young recalls, "as for acoustic guitar, Bert Jansch is on the same level as Jimi. That first record of his is epic. It came from England, and I was especially taken with 'The Needle of Death,' such a beautiful and angry song. That guy was so good [...] and years later, on On the Beach, I wrote the melody of "Ambulance Blues" by styling the guitar part completely on 'The Needle of Death.' I wasn't even aware of it."

Despite recording mostly original material, Jansch was able to issue a quick follow-up to his successful debut, a testament to his prodigious talent and the result of a considerable backlog of songs from his days of busking and one-nighters. His first turn in a professional recording studio (Pye Studios to be exact) produced  It Don't Bother Me, which, while not as consistently brilliant or as dark as his debut, featured Jansch broadening his approach a bit by occasionally utilizing banjo instead of acoustic guitar and by bringing in additional musicians such as John Renbourn and Roy Harper. In addition to introducing Jansch as a major talent on acoustic guitar, these early albums also evidenced something else that set him apart from many of his Folk-guitar peers: his singing voice. Although he was by no means a gifted vocalist, unlike some of the other major figures on the London Folk scene, such as Davey Graham, John Renbourn, and Wizz Jones, Jansch's mournfully fractured croon was instantly recognizable and highly emotive. He would take his impressive skills to a new level on his next album, Jack Orion, whose all-covers approach bore the imprint of Anne Briggs who had been teaching Jansch traditional Folk songs to re-interpret through his unique Jazz-Blues aesthetic. The result, while not generally considered as essential as Jansch's first two albums, is a peerless example of late-sixties progressive British Folk, whose epic title track ranks with Jansch's best moments on tape. Another standout is "Blackwaterside," whose distinctive rolling, stop-start melody was pinched, virtually note for note, by Jimmy Page for inclusion on Led Zeppelin's debut as "Black Mountainside." While Transatlantic Records wanted to pursue legal action against Page, Jansch's response to the situation was entirely what one would expect from such a modest master: "I was just a singer and a guitar player. It was the record company who was suing for breach of copyright. It's got nothing to do with me." Rest in peace Bert. You will certainly be missed.

Pentangle- The Pentangle (1968) MP3 & FLAC -For Le Lapin Argent-

"A woman is a branchy tree, and a man's a clinging vine. And from her branches carelessly, he'll take what he can find."

Pentangle were an enigma during their initial (and quite stunning) run of albums from 1968 to 1972. While basically a folk-supergroup, these were certainly not your father's folk musicians. Infused with a counter-culture ethos of open experimentation inherited from psychedelia-inspired rock bands, but doing so playing primarily acoustic instruments (including traditional folk instruments), Pentangle were capable of weaving together the fragility of an Elizabethan ballad, the experimental drive of Post-Bop Jazz, and the extended peregrinations of an acid-drenched jam session all in the same song. While led by two guitar geniuses, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch, the band was anchored by a peerless rhythm section comprised of Terry Cox and Danny Thompson, and to my ears at least, Thompson's amazing stand-up bass work is the true star of these recordings. From the opening bars of their 1968 debut, The Pentangle, it is clear that the band has revisionism on its mind. In addition to a soaring lead vocal by Jacqui McShee, "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" features some razor sharp percussive guitar twang from Jansch that, along with Cox's inventive percussive effects, takes the song far beyond its traditional origins. The Pentangle is one of the true highlights of the late-sixties British folk movement, a movement replete with great music.

Pentangle- "Travelling Song" (1968) Live, British T.V.

What's better than a Jansch-McShee duet?  You can probably guess what's right 'round the corner...