BERT JANSCH

Moonshine is the eighth album by Scottish folk musician Bert Jansch, released shortly after his departure from Pentangle.

Although the cover painting suggests the booze-oriented interpretation for the title of this album, its sound feels like mostly related to nature and country ambiance to me. Building up this impression we find here a considerable congregation of instrumental talents, among which I particularly enjoy woodwinds & recorders.

As for Bert's own songwriting craftmanship, what can I say that's not been already said? Alternative tunings for his acoustic guitar, early english music reminiscences, uniquely sounding pastoral settings, modal flavoured vocal melodies, it's all there.

No doubt, this is excellent, and maybe a bit prog too

Herbert Jansch was a Scottish folk singer, songwritter & guitarist widely known as a founding member of the band Pentangle.

This album, one of my favourites, is a folk & blues affair based on acoustic guitar's non-standard tunings, a technique that was the hallmark of his sound. There's also nice yet sparse contributions by the band, here and there. Most prominently, we find here drummer Pick Withers, about entering world fame with Dire Straits by then, who delivers a tasty & tight sense of rythm in mostly mid-tempo incursions. Nice touches of Rhodes electric piano and fiddle, too. Badge of honor to Rod Clements (Lindisfarne) who underpins the whole recording with his precise and pulsating bass lines.

If folk may be seen as progressive, this may be a fine prog album.

— First review of this album —

My last walk down memory lane with the late John Renbourn features, exclusively, all instrumental collaborations with his old Pentangle sparring partner Bert Jansch. After The Dance is a compilation that focuses exclusively on the duo's joint solo recordings that showcase the interplay between the two acoustic guitar virtuosos and even includes four uncredited Pentangle tracks that also focus on the duo's playing. Starting off with the mesmerizing "Tic-tocative", from the album titled Bert And John, we are quickly followed by the jazzy Pentangle jam like song titled "Waltz" from the group's first album. The millisecond timing between the two is still breathtaking even 50 years after the fact. The jazzy "Piano Tune" is a perfect opener before the duo launch into the scrumptious Mingus standard "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" with, again, a heavy emphasis on jazz juxtapositions before being followed by the manic "Hole In The Coal" from Pentangle's second album "Sweet Child". The duo start to morph into more blues based playing on songs like 'Lucky 13", Stepping Stones" and "Red's Favorite" before switching back to jazz grooves on "No Exit" (another Pentangle jam), "Bells", and this compilation's title track "After The Dance". As a change of pace the stately pseudo Elizabethan "Orlando" and the manic eastern tinged "East Wind" keep this collection form becoming a monotony as does the rendering of the trad. song "The Wagoner's Lad". The latter featuring Jansch on a banjo!

How this great sounding and excellently remastered album is not essential listening for all up and coming guitar players is quite beyond me. 5 stars for something that has never been duplicated since on any record.

The third part of the archetype for the sound of future folk rock band The Pentangle, along with John Renbourn's Another Monday and the Jansch/Renbourn collaboration tilted Bert & John. The solo Jansch album Jack Orion, to me, may be the least accessible but the most important. By this time Bert Jansch hit upon adding musical accompaniment to traditional British folk songs using alternate guitar tunings such as DADGAD to create droning pseudo Celtic musical atmospheres. Employing his future Pentangle band mate John Renbourn to supplement his singing and playing on songs like 'Pretty Polly', 'The Wagoner's Lad', 'Henry Martin', and the stunning 9 minute long title track. Indeed, 'Jack Orion' may seem like a song with overlong verbiage but it is a long detailed Shakespearian-like drama that rewards close listening as the lyrics deal with deceit, betrayal, revenge, murder and suicide. All the key musical and lyrical elements that would soon find its way into the Pentangle's sound and make the band so great and so unique. Other album highlights include an instrumental acoustic reading of Ewan MacColl's 'The First Time Ever I saw Your Face' and Jansch's seminal adaption of the evergreen traditional song 'Blackwater Side'. Jansch's vocals are still a little on the rip-shod side, but better then those found on It Don't Bother Me. 3.5 stars rounded off to 4.

If an album could be described as suffering the dreaded 'sophomore blues' its this follow up album to Bert Jansch's legendary debut. Sporting better production values but not better material, It Don't Bother Me seems a rushed affair and probably was at the time it was recorded and released. After all, who knew that Jansch's eponymous debut would be so popular in the British folk circles of the mid 1960s. Overall, the songs have a less polished sloppy presentation, especially on Bert's rough-hewn vocals.

Songs that stand out on It Don't Bother Me are 'Anti Apartheid', "Harvest Your Thoughts Of Love' and the album's dark and moody title track. John Renbourn guests on the wonderful instrumental 'Lucky Thirteen' while Jansch does a solo on the cyclical sounding instrumental titled 'The Wheel'.

It Don't Bother Me is by no means a bad album, it just doesn't improve on Jansch's debut. That would come pass on Jansch's third solo offering coming up quickly titled Jack Orion and, of course, with the debut album of the Pentangle that followed close behind. 3 stars.

Another wonderful and necessary record to accompany listening to the early Pentangle canon is this 'folk baroque' classic collaboration by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn that is a powerhouse recording of mostly titillating and jaw dropping instrumentals that runs the gamut of Arabic scales raga (East Wind) to psychic call and response playing on blues, jazz, Elizabethan styled songs (Piano Tune, Good Bye Pork Pie Hat, Orlando)and exciting self penned songs that show off the duo's virtuoso playing chops (Tic-Tocative, No Exit and Stepping Stones). The record also contains two songs that were sung numbers by Jansch, the dark and brooding 'Soho' and the Anne Briggs penned 'The Time Has Come'. 'Soho' is an instant classic while 'The Time Has Come' is less successful and would be reinterpreted by The Pentangle a few years later with greater success. Indeed, The Pentangle would also remake 'Pork Pie Hat' and 'No Exit' on their second album Sweet Child and comparing the development of these songs is part of the fun for Pentangle aficionados.

The Castle remaster sports the best sound ever heard for this recording and is, as usual, graced with detailed liner notes by noted Jansch biographer Colin Harper and also sports some never before seen pics of our heroes. If you've run out of early Pentangle albums to savor, then this disc is the place to fill that void. 5 Stars.

Beyond the hype, music, sweet music.

It's easy to place Bert Jansch's and his Pentangle partner John Renbourn's early solo albums as a type of addendum to their Pentangle canon. A type of unofficial 'immersion' material, if you will, as many of the 'folk baroque' trademarks that the duo pioneered presage the trademark Pentangle sound as well as posting a crossover of solo songs onto later Pentangle albums where fans can track their development.

However, Jansch's first solo album, while being hailed as a British folk rock icon, goes well beyond that. To put it simply, beyond it's ground breaking fill of self penned songs and dexterous guitar instrumentals, the music and voice of the man soars to a height that Jansch rarely bettered in his entire recorded lifetime. That's mainly because Jansch was so well versed in this material, probably for years, before they were immortalized in black vinyl. When the album starts with the bucolic 'Strolling Down The Highway' not only is this beautiful song sung pitch perfect, but every slight and secondary guitar note was meticulously thought out and accompanies the song's dominant chords and melodies in a way that makes the music always sound so much more than just a man recorded with a single acoustic guitar. Jansch's oft celebrated song for a passed friend 'Needle of Death' with it's heart tugging lyric seems to have all the sweep and grandeur of an orchestra that simply isn't there. But Jansch makes you think it, feel it and believe it. And this, along with his definitive ligatos, pull offs, slurs, string pulls and all other tricks that are hard to define by his slight of playing hand , as on the Davy Graham instrumental standard 'Angi', not only made Jansch a musician's musician, it put him into a category of British folk artist that was heretofore unknown.

But again, aside form the accolades of Jansch's solo debut, it's the music that delivers more than 50 years since it was first recorded. And with that, it really deserves more accolades than just being an addendum to a folk rock super group. 4.5 stars rounded up 5.

Cutting against the grain of popular trends in folk music, whilst electric folk was at the high water mark of its fashion Bert Jansch put out this acoustic, classically-tinged album of much more traditional material, Captivatingly emotional, with an unabashedly romantic bent, there's a certain timelessness to the material here. With impeccable performance and production standards, and a complete independence from fashionable trends, the album sounds like it could have been made at any point in the last four or five decades - provided, of course, you had a Bert Jansch handy to pull off the heartfelt sincerity of the performance. Four stars sounds right.

"Who are you gonna kill now? Please let me know. Is it a Arab or a Jew? Or a child on his way to school? Who are you gonna kill now? Cause I sure want to know. Who are you gonna kill now?"

Between the years 1983 to 1985, Bert Jansch was in the throes of alcohol addiction, was overweight and puffy, and looked far from the dashing troubadour figure that he cut in the late 1960's. He maintained a working relationship with the revamped Pentangle and, oddly, started writing some of the best songs of his career. Perhaps it was not so odd. If not a cry for help, Jansch at least started barring his soul on a myriad of personal as well as social problems on these songs, with a few ending up on the excellent Pentangle album In The Round. The remainder, featuring only Jansch and his guitar (and just a banjo on one track) appeared on this odd little album from 1984(5?) titled From The Outside. It was originally a limited run of 500 that Jansch sold at his concert appearances.

Often referred to by fans as Jansch's "dark album", this collection of introspective and sometimes angry songs would be nothing less than his best for many, many years to come. There's no trad. folk on this album, but Jansch does elevate the mood with some folky reminiscing about roses and lost loves ("Sweat Rose" and "Still Love Her Now That She's Gone"), before he tells everyone to get angry and "shout to stop the bomb" on the track simply titled "Shout". Penultimate song "I Sure Want To Know" (available on the latest CD reissue with bonus tracks) features the lyrics stated in the opening of this review and are self explanatory, as well as being a terrifically catchy song.

Jansch would go on to recover from his alcoholism a short time after this album was released but, oddly, he would never write songs as good as these again. Perhaps that's not so odd. This album is currently available from Earth on both CD and Vinyl in 2016 with the Castle CD track listing and bonus tracks.

The first of the "appreciation of Bert Jansch by younger fans" albums, Crimson Moon, recorded at Bert's new digital home recording studio in 2000, is a warm, mellow, and extremely atmospheric album that conjures up images of Scotland (Caledonia), lovelorn ex lovers (Crimson Moon and Looking for Love) and a few good old tales of murder (the traditional song Omie Wise). There's even a rare comment from Bert about the ecology on the song Neptune's Daughter, about a mermaid-like woman who relates the tales of her dead relatives that were killed by a black plague (an oil slick that poisons their ocean.)

What makes Crimson Moon different from other later era Jansch albums is the more liberal use of electric guitar played by Jansch himself along with guests like Johnny Hodge and Bernard Butler. There's no "shred fests" going on here, but it is a welcome change from Jansch's amazing run of acoustic guitar based albums up until this point. The electrics help to add mood and texture to the ever present acoustics. As others have stated, Jansch has nothing more to prove in regard to his guitar playing skills, but has focused on his songwriting, which has always been his strong suit when he's been inspired. And it seems that the appreciation of younger artists like Johnny Marr and Beth Orton has done just that with his compositions on Crimson Moon. Not an essential for Jansch fans, but Crimson Moon is quite an enjoyable and easy listen. 3 stars.