I thought that Flann O’Brien’s hundredth birthday must make this a celebratory sort of day, but in fact it has brought sad news. The Scottish guitarist, singer and songwriter Bert Jansch has died aged 67. He was only born in 1943. That’s not so long ago. You’d think he deserved another 15 years at least. He died of cancer. I don’t know whether this related to the amount he had smoked. He used to drink a lot too, I’m sure of that – though it seems that he stopped and rescued his health in the mid-1990s.
Bert Jansch’s death feels premature. That’s one reason it affects people – not just me but, for instance, all the people who have logged in to pay brief tribute on a Guardian thread about him. Another reason it touches me is that he was of my parents’ generation, and important to them. My father was born a year after Bert Jansch. He went to see him, at a folk club I think, in his home town, way back – this must have been about 1964, when the first LP was released. Goodness, that’s getting on for 50 years ago. He saw Jansch play a few times over subsequent years also, and kept coming back to the music in recent years – rediscovering the early LP Jack Orion on a CD release, and the late work Crimson Moon with Marr and Butler. Only last year I bought my dad the early album Bert & John on CD: a brief live stereo recording of Jansch and John Renbourn on duelling acoustics. Those guitarists were part of Britain’s folk revival in the 1960s. That music scene was important to lots of young British people, including beatniks, students, CND activists – not that Jansch himself was playing political songs. Since I’ve known who Bert Jansch was, I’ve associated him with this generational history. He feels important to me in part because he has been important to others.
I like the music myself, too. I have never really made my way into Pentangle, the folk-rock-jazz supergroup that Jansch and Renbourn formed with others, though one or two of their LPs were around when I was a child, and some of the obituary talk presents that as though it’s his major achievement. Maybe it’s time to try. But I know Jansch mostly as a solo performer, and I associate him most with single-track recordings, voice and acoustic guitar presumably taped live. It seems fair to say that he was the greatest living British folk guitarist. His playing was legendary. Other guitarists genuflected to it. I’m not as good as them, let alone him, but I can identify with the admiration, the sense that this if you take the path of the acoustic guitar, this is the maestro. But I always get the impression that he was not forbidding or full of himself. He seems to have been shy, modest, mumbling, wearing his talent lightly.
I’m not sure that I can describe the distinctiveness of Jansch’s guitar playing. Others may be trying to do it. I think of his stinging hammer-ons and pull-offs, how casually, almost constantly he drops them in to some tracks. His ability, playing alone, to keep the undercarriage going while playing something melodic on top. A looseness – that’s what seems to stand out – an organic looseness that makes you think he wouldn’t have been that suited to playing with a drummer, let alone a drum machine. He seems to varying the tempo and the rhythm in accordance with the song, the feeling of where he is in it. His playing has no rigidity, is fluid, changeable, improvised, happening in a moment. It’s a precious substance, but also casual, disposable, for it could go on for ever.
He recorded a track called ‘Blackwater Side’ which has a lyric – ‘one morning fair / I took the air’ – sung in his mournful country voice. I listen to it now and I’m very struck by how the voice and guitar happen simultaneously: not just guitar ‘accompaniment’ but lead playing, in effect, combinations of notes rolling and blasting percussively out of the track. There is an instrumental of the same tune called ‘The First Time Ever’. But an early track I like still more is ‘Running From Home’. This has fewer guitar fireworks. It is a gentle stream of a song, a river that flows on and on. Jansch plays on guitar the same sweet melody that he sings. It swings back and forth across two chords – a B and an A, or whatever. The song is about restlessness, running to the big city, and perhaps the chords get at that. But there is also something peaceful in it, a wise calm, a wide angle. I think it’s my favourite Bert Jansch song.
But I also especially like one other: ‘Woe Is Love My Dear’. The voice sounds like Bert Jansch all right, but the music doesn’t – not like those other virtuoso acoustic solos. It sounds like Nick Drake on Five Leaves Left or Bryter Later: tinkling piano like John Cale’s on ‘Northern Sky’, soaring flute. It’s early-1970s pastoral, ‘electric Eden’ stuff, a traditional melody and old words, done with a daft overreach, a flowery garden of sound. It’s like the music that seemed to have inspired the Belle & Sebastian of ‘Mary Jo’. Once upon a time I had an idea that I wanted to play it at a gig – in Glasgow, perhaps? I’m pretty sure I never played the gig. I certainly never played the song. But what an expansive, vaulting melody.
Those are some of my favourites from the music of Bert Jansch, who will be sorely missed and remembered fondly.
