Bert Jansch

Biography

Bert Jansch was one of the most original acoustic guitarists of the twentieth century, weaving together British folk tradition, Delta blues fingerpicking, and jazz improvisation into a style so individual that Jimmy Page cited him as a primary influence and Neil Young called him a huge inspiration. His 1965 self-titled debut, recorded for a few dozen pounds in a friend's flat, is considered one of the greatest acoustic guitar albums ever made, raw, intimate, and technically staggering. With Pentangle he bridged the gap between folk revival and jazz, and the group's Basket of Light (1969) reached the UK Top 5 in a pop climate that rarely made room for acoustic string music. He remained a deeply influential figure to successive generations of fingerstyle players long after his death in 2011.

Legendary Performance

Pentangle at the Royal Festival Hall

June 29, 1968 · Royal Festival Hall, London

Pentangle's debut concert at the Royal Festival Hall in June 1968 was among the first occasions in British popular music where fingerpicking folk guitar, jazz improvisation, blues structure, and art music were presented as a coherent whole rather than a mixture of influences. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn played acoustic guitars that were individually virtuosic and collectively interlocked, and the rhythm section of Danny Thompson (double bass) and Terry Cox (drums) gave the ensemble a weight that folk music had never previously possessed. The concert was sold out, the reviews were unlike anything written about a folk act before, and the recording of the performance became a document of a particular moment when British folk guitar was briefly the most innovative music being made in the country.

Jimmy Page, who was building Led Zeppelin at exactly this period, has cited Jansch's playing as a primary influence on his acoustic work, the DADGAD tuning, the fingerpicking architecture of "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp," the acoustic passages on "Led Zeppelin III" all carry Jansch's fingerprints. Neil Young called him one of the three or four most important guitarists he had ever heard. The Royal Festival Hall concert is the document that captures the quality that provoked those reactions: an approach to the acoustic guitar so fully realised that it influenced the electric players who would go on to define the decade.

Gear

Martin 00-18 & Custom Stefan Sobell Acoustic (1960s-2011)

Known for: Self-titled debut album, 1965; Pentangle recordings

Bert Jansch played acoustic guitars throughout his career without modification, amplification, or effects, the guitar itself, through a microphone when necessary, was his complete signal chain. His primary instrument through the early years was a Martin 00-18, a small-bodied mahogany acoustic whose clarity and projection suited his fingerpicking approach. The small body allowed him to play seated without the instrument obscuring his picking arm, and the mahogany construction gave the tone a warmth that matched the blues and folk material he was drawing from.

Later in his career, Jansch played a guitar built for him by luthier Stefan Sobell, a British maker who specialised in instruments for professional folk players. The Sobell guitar was crafted to Jansch's specific requirements after decades of professional playing, the neck profile, string spacing, and body dimensions matched the technique he had developed, and the instrument became his primary guitar for the last years of his performing life.

Signature Technique

Fingerpicking Architecture & British Folk Tuning Innovation

Bert Jansch's fingerpicking technique was built without formal instruction: he learned from records, from watching other players, and from the particular British folk guitar tradition that was developing around him in Edinburgh and London in the early 1960s. The result was an approach that looked idiosyncratic from the outside but was internally consistent, an alternating-bass pattern in the left hand combined with melodic picking in the right that produced the effect of two guitarists playing simultaneously. He used DADGAD tuning and variants of drop-D before either had been codified as standard approaches in folk or rock music, arriving at them by ear as solutions to the harmonic problems the music presented rather than as pre-existing techniques to be learned.

Jimmy Page has explicitly named Jansch as the guitarist who taught him what the acoustic guitar could do, the DADGAD work on Led Zeppelin's acoustic passages, the fingerpicking architecture of "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp," the modal quality of the acoustic material on "Led Zeppelin III" all derive from listening to Jansch's early albums. Neil Young, Donovan, and Nick Drake all absorbed something from the same source. That degree of downstream influence is the most reliable measure of a technique's significance: Jansch's approach to the acoustic guitar was original enough that it changed the way other guitarists heard the instrument, not just in folk music but in the rock and singer-songwriter traditions that drew from it.