Bert Jansch - Jack Orion

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Transatlantic TRA 143 (2001)
Recorded c. early summer 1966 at 5 North Villas, Camden, London
Varias ediciones, compilaciones (bertjansch.com)



A
1. The Waggoner's Lad   [3:25]
2. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face   [1:41]
3. Jack Orion   [9:46]


B
1. The Gardener   [1:43]
2. Nottamun Town   [4:34]
3. Henry Martin   [3:11]
4. Blackwaterside   [3:44]
5. Pretty Polly   [4:00]

(Trad., Arr. Jansch, excepto A.2: McColl)


Bert Jansch, guitar, banjo, vocal
John Renbourn, second guitar on A.1 A.3 / B.3 B.5

By the beginning of 1966 Bert Jansch, his flatmate and occasional performing partner John Renboum and their musical mentor Davy Graham were all perceived as a quite distinctive by-product of the British folk revival, and their technical accomplishments were taken as read. "They've proved that they can exist as an independent 'third stream', influenced by both folk and jazz," wrote Karl Dallas in Melody Maker. "They've now got to produce some really memorable music that stands up on its own account."

Following his initial breakthrough the previous year, not only as an instrumentalist but as a songwriter of stark originality with songs like 'Needle Of Death" which seemed to speak to a generation, Bert's next significant progression was to   be found in his third album Jack Orion - a brooding, intense and deeply individual approach to the British and Irish tradition. Fine though they were, his second album It Don't Bother Me had simply pursued the songwriting idiom of Bert Jansch - more robust and self-confident perhaps, though necessarily lacking its predecessor's element of surprise - while his jointly-billed collaboration with Renbourn, Bert And John (released simultaneously with Jack Orion in September 1966) was essentially an exploration of jazz-based ideas that would see fruition a year or two down the line with the formation of folk-jazz fusion pioneers The Pentangle.

Having found the 'real studio' work for It Don't Bother Me a pressurised experience, both Bert And John and Jack Orion would be recorded by Bill Leader in the front room of the pair's flat at 23 St. Edmund's Terrace. Completing the picture with Renbourn second solo album, Another Monday (recorded at Leader's place during that summer of '66), here were three albums bursting with ideas and addressing Karl Dallas's challenge in striving for something musically substantial out of what was still a novel and embryonic genre dangerously close to being perceived as delighted by its own ability. Each of the three albums were viewed individually and with the luxury of time - and these were, let us not forget, albums recorded in little more than an afternoon - may reveal imperfections in execution, scope or variety yet taken together they present a musical jigsaw of extraordinary inventiveness and imagination. Modern jazz, European baroque, American hillbilly, Dylanesque contemporary songs and, exemplified most startlingly on Jack Orion, British and Irish traditional music were all facets to be singularly mastered and woven together.

Though featuring Renbourn on four tracks, Jack Orion was the product of ideas that had been brewing in Bert's mind alone and fermenting in his playing style for the previous year or more, and was consequently the most focused, taut and energized product of the trilogy. Its impact was immense Bert had at last committed to record the first fruits of the explorations with traditional music, relying exclusively on DADGAD or 'dropped D' tunings, that he had begun with his friend Anne Briggs - the now legendary English traditional singer - before even his first album had been released. An element of synchronicity had been involved, as both were in London with a little time to kill during the early weeks of 1965 and with a mutual friend in Gill Cook whose flat was free during the day:

"Bert would come around to Gill's flat when there was nothing else to do," says Anne, "and we'd work together for our own personal interest on traditional songs, with his dramatic guitar playing. We discovered that they could really gel together. Once he started elaborating on what I'd come up with I had to move fast to keep up, so it really brought my guitar playing along. He'd write a verse, I'd write a verse. I'd come up with a tune, he'd play it, and he'd elaborate on it. It was a very creative period but it only went on for a very short time." The process was almost accidental, to Anne's recollection "There was a lot of stuff that just drifted away - if it wasn't together by the end of the afternoon, forget about it". But three original songs survived, to filter out on albums by both Bert and Anne individually between 1966-71: 'Go Your Way, My Love', 'Wishing Well' and 'The Time Has Come'. The last track was composed by Anne alone, the others jointly, but all three combined otherworldliness, foreboding and melancholy and were quite unprecedented in any genre of popular music.

More important than the quality of the songs written together, however, was the development of a new approach to accompanying traditional music - superficially similar to that explored by the relatively short-lived Shirley Collins/Davy Graham project (which resulted in the album Folk Row Neal Routes, coincidentally released during the Jansch/Briggs writing sessions) but free-er of form, looser in feel and as sensual and fresh as the content of the first song it was designed for the one-night-stand Irish ballad 'Blackwaterside'. For all the rivalry that would develop between Jansch and Graham over the next few years, real or imagined, Graham would come to regard 'Blackwaterside' at the very least as "a masterpiece of its kind, and I do not use that word loosely".

"All the traditional singers I knew at the time, like Jimmy MacBeath and Jeannie Robertson," says Bert, "were older people and you couldn't exactly say, 'Could you just slow that down and repeat that verse?' But Anne, because she knew all these songs, I could quite happily get her to sit and go over the likes of 'Blackwaterside' a few times until I'd worked out how to do it on the guitar. This was the first time I'd ever actually sat down and taken a folk song other than a Woody Guthrie-type song - a number that bad a definite melody line that I couldn't change - and consciously created a backing to go with it."

"He had always had a real feeling for traditional music," says Anne, "but when I first knew him he just didn't think he had the right sort of voice and couldn't use the guitar in the right way to be a singer of traditional songs himself. By this time he'd become a much sophisticated player, and I think he had the confidence to handle it. Everybody up to that point was accompanying traditional songs in a very Woody Guthrie, three-chord way. I was never happy with that - not in an academic sense, just aesthetically. It was why I always sang unaccompanied. I'd played guitar since I was fourteen or fifteen but seeing Bert's freedom from chords I suddenly realised that this chord stuff — you don't need it."

They were exciting discoveries: "I was pregnant at the time but working very hard in the shop," says Gill Cook, an assistant at the specialist record shop Collet's, "and I can remember them ringing up and saying, 'Hey, we've just written a song!'" Bert and Anne never performed their new songs or traditional settings together at that time. To Bert's mind they were simply "too erratic to get it together"; to Anne's, it was a case of audiences perceiving them as entirely unrelated performers. For all her new-found freedoms as an instrumentalist using alternate tunings learnt from Bert - Graham's DADGAD and the DADGBE of 'Blackwaterside' - Anne would not have the confidence to use a guitar onstage for same years yet. It is not known when Bert debuted the ground-breaking 'Blackwaterside' onstage, but it would have to wait a year and a half to appear on record.

"Jack Orion really turned people upside down," says Martin Carthy. "Bert And John not so much. At the time, Jack Orion was the one where people just sat back and thought, 'What is he trying to do?' It was just so outrageous and different, so unlike anything else that anybody else had ever played - and the title track was nine minutes long! For us twenty to twenty-five year-olds ballads were still boring things which you had to get down to as few verses as possible. We didn't actually understand this idea that it's not a question of how long a ballad is, it's the fact that it does so much in such a short space of time: so it's thirty verses and ten minutes long - that's two and a half hours in a film. And if you give it just as much concentration as you give a film you're going to be just as excited."

'Jack Orion' itself was the vestige of a traditional melody, reconstructed by folklorist Bert Lloyd as a narrative on the sexually charged adventures of a demonic fiddler. Bert Jansch's version succeeded more through the intensity of performance than through any great accuracy in execution: this was a relentlessly dark, dense assault upon the hallowed tradition. Other tracks, however 'Trad Arr.' in their credits, were vehicles for the scattergun imagination behind Bert's instrumental work. His interpretation of 'The Gardener' (a ballad sometimes referred to as 'The Gardener's Child'), a song learned from his Edinburgh friend Owen Hand, was wildly impressionistic - a wordless vocal scatting some rumour of the song's melody atop a cyclical, string-snapping riff which reappeared in the arrangements of Ewan MacColl's 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' (sensitively performed, and a moment of light in the modal darkness) and the immortal 'Blackwaterside'.

That song at least, by far the most crafted piece on the record, had already been played around the clubs. Fellow singer-songwriter Al Stewart had been following Bert around, keenly observing this revolutionary new playing style and determined to master it. A few weeks before Jack Orion appeared, Al had booked a studio and session players to make his own record debut. Jimmy Page, an established sessioneer, timed up to play guitar and during a tea-break Al played him Bert's accompaniment for 'Blackwaterside'. It was possibly Page's first acquaintance with the DADGAD tuning, and the seeds were sown of what would later become a distinctively folky, eastern-influenced but very British element in mainstream seventies rock that would have wide-ranging reverberations in that world.

In his subsequent capacity as a member of Led Zeppelin, the biggest rock group of the seventies, Page would be enthusing wildly on the topic of Jansch for years to come: "A real dream-weaver," he said. "At one period I was absolutely obsessed by Bert Jansch. I watched him playing once at a folk club and it was like seeing a classical guitarist. All the inversions he was playing were unrecognizable. He was the innovator of the time."

"I don't recall being shocked," says Transatlantic label boss Nat Joseph, on checking out Bert's new sound for himself. "I was never shocked when I heard anything other than when it was very bad. Bringing in the traditional material was something that seemed to me extremely interesting because everybody had thought of Bert as a kind of Dylanesque character. He was going back to the roots and I couldn't see why no."

"The treatments may not be trad but they're fantastic," agreed the reviewer for Sing. 'At first sight the idea is horrifying," cautioned Karl Dallas in MM, "a bluesy guitarist who has hitherto concentrated on contemporary subjects singing the big old ballads of the true traditionalist. In fact, Jansch's interpretations illuminate the songs from a completely new angle. As sung by him, the brutal world that created the old ballads doesn't seem so very far off from the world of the 'Needle Of Death'."

Colin Harper, July 2001 - author of Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival (Bloomsbury, 2000)