Bert Jansch

Bert Jansch (1965)

Recorded alone on a borrowed tape machine, Jansch's debut has a rawness that its enormous influence on more polished players tends to obscure. "Needle of Death," a plainspoken elegy for a friend lost to addiction, pairs an unflinching lyric with fingerpicking that never once resorts to decoration for its own sake. "Angie" (an arrangement of Davey Graham's tune) shows the technical side of his playing that so many guitarists tried to reverse-engineer. It's a quietly radical record disguised as a modest one.

Sleeve notes

Bert Jansch · 1965

Bert Jansch emerged from the Edinburgh and London folk clubs of the early 1960s with a guitar style — intricate, percussive, drawing on blues and jazz phrasing as much as traditional folk — that reshaped what acoustic guitar playing could sound like in Britain. His self-titled 1965 debut, recorded cheaply on a reel-to-reel in a friend's kitchen, circulated among a generation of guitarists who treated it as a kind of technical bible.

Jansch went on to co-found the folk-jazz group Pentangle and continued recording solo for decades, but it's the raw, unpolished intensity of his earliest work that has proven most durable as a reference point. Guitarists across rock and folk alike, from Jimmy Page to Nick Drake, have cited him directly, and his fingerstyle vocabulary remains embedded in how acoustic guitar is played in the folk tradition that followed him.