Category: Bert Jansch

Tis the season. As those chilly winds pick up, the sonic migration toward the isles is near unavoidable. While any Bert Jansch LP is certainly fitting this time of the year (and any time of the year, mind you), one in particular deserves its time in the limelight during the shorter days. It may be the most overlooked of Bert’s early run of classic records, but Nicola is certainly worthy of a bit of reappraisal. Maybe it was the strings? The electric guitar? The horns? Whatever, the reason, the record rarely comes up in the Jansch conversation.

It’s officially Bert Jansch season. Recorded live in the spring of 1973 for Norwegian television, the following twenty-eight minute session finds the Scottish troubadour in the company of Norwegian folkie Finn Kalvik. The set kicks off with the pair collaborating on Jansch’s own “Running From Home” (via his 1965 s/t LP) before sliding into an alternating guitar pull between the two musicians. Koselig!

The highlight of this exhaustively curated set are the performances which allow us to listen in to a full concert or series of tunes. It is here that we experience Bert’s crowning achievement—the temporal transcendence of music consciousness. From one song to the next Jansch could transport his audience to 1930’s Mississippi, the court of King James, or a 1974 folk club in Soho without missing a beat.

There were probably cooler things for Bert Jansch to do in the late 1970s than make an instrumental folk-jazz concept record about birds … but the late guitarist was never […]

As a solo artist and as one fifth of Pentangle , Bert Jansch’s six-string stylings captivated guitarists as disparate as Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Johnny Marr. His sound is instantly […]