Noting the influence by English folk giants Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, and Ann Briggs (listen to “Go Your Way” at 23:26), Chicago’s Ryley Walker gives a groovy studio performance and interview with Seattle radio KEXP. The first clip is from 2014 and second is a year later, 2015.
Bert Jansch
The Quietus Reviews | Pentangle
It’s perhaps hard to imagine in today’s pop landscape, but back in the 1960s there was a definite insurrection happening in the folk milieu, a drawing of battle lines about what ‘folk music’ could be. The mindset of the folk revival of the previous decade, one of a reverence for tradition and purism, had fossilised into a stilted dogma of conservatism.
Many of the younger singers and musicians breaking through chafed against what they saw as a parochial and out-of-touch clique.From this unrest rose a triumvirate of folk bands whose musical explorations played a part in causing folk music to slip its traditional shackles and become, in the words of Rob Young in his book on modern British folk music Electric Eden, a “floating signifier to be plucked from the air and appropriated by anyone who could find a suitable framework”.
In one corner there was Fairport Convention, who grafted UK folk to a US country rock sound. In another, you had the likes of The Incredible String Band, whose hippy meanderings across north Africa and Asia resulted in strange instruments, new sounds and a positively kaleidoscopic freak scene of psychedelia.But probably the most beguiling and inscrutable of them all is Pentangle [ . . . ]
Read Full Record Review at: The Quietus | Reviews | Pentangle
Bert Jansch – “Jack Orion” (Full album)
Track Listing:
1. The Waggoner’s Lad
2. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
3. Jack Orion
4. The Gardener
5. Nottamun Town
6. Henry Martin
7. Black Water Side
8. Pretty Polly
Bert Inspired: a Concert for Bert Jansch review – fond renditions and a lot of guitar tuning
Jazz-folk veterans, Britpop pin-ups, classic rock icons, up-and-coming singer-songwriters – how many other musicians except Bert Jansch sit at such a spaghetti junction of influence? A stellar lineup assembles to remember the late Pentangle founder member and finger-picking guitar hero in his city of birth at the first of two Celtic Connections curtain-closing concerts in his honour. An evening of fond renditions and recollections, and a lot of guitar tuning.
Graham Coxon had written beforehand of how nervous he was on meeting Jansch. The Blur guitarist looks twitchy here, too, as he performs an affectionate One for Jo and a “Bert-imbued” solo composition Latte, but returns later, much more at ease, for a tricksy twang on Angie together with Martin Simpson. Elsewhere before the interval we get songs from Jansch’s former fellow Pentanglers Jacqui McShee and Mike Piggott, and Jansch’s one-time mentor Archie Fisher doing Down by Blackwaterside – Jansch’s arrangement that he once famously accused Led Zeppelin of ripping off with Black Mountain Side.
Not one to bear a grudge, Robert Plant lends superstar magnetism to proceedings, backed by his superb five-piece band the Sensational Space Shifters. The opening notes of a whispered Babe I’m Gonna Leave You are met with an almost disbelieving collective intake of breath; his second set will end with an entrancingly amped-up Poison. [ . . . ]
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