ROOTS OF A LEGEND
Scottish folk guitarist Archie Fisher taught Bert Jansch how to play. Here, he remembers the first steps Bert took in the world of acoustic guitar – and how he became the most distinctive voice of his generation
“My first impression of Bert was when I was helping to run The Howff Folk Club on Edinburgh’s High Street. Jill Doyle, Davey Graham’s sister and I were holding guitar lessons, Jill with beginners and myself with advanced (not that advanced in retrospect). After about 15 minutes Jill came through leading a young fella dangling what Rab Noakes used to call a “pram shop guitar” announcing that she couldn’t teach this lad anymore. He quickly caught up with the students in my class. He had an osmotic quality about guitar playing transposing the visual picture to the fingerboard immediately. There were no great guitar-playing role models around but the most competent local lad was Len Partridge. He sported a cathedral quality Grimshaw 12-string and seemed to know his way around Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly licks. Come Back Baby was his party piece and that was quickly soaked up by the Bert guitar-playing sponge.
“We were both inveterate guitar doodlers in these days, picking up riffs and bridges from whatever we heard and fitting them into whatever we wanted to play, sometimes inappropriately. This technique stayed with the early Bert style and he would build an accompaniment to a song with guitar ‘building blocks’ of riffs and bridges and sing against this pattern. Eventually, this became much more sophisticated and appropriate. An early Bert interpretation or composition would start with and extended guitar intro that set the mood and tempo and a song would break out almost seamlessly from that. In his own work he often composed the tune around a set of guitar motifs – building a symbiotic parallel run of words and guitar music.
“SOMEWHERE, I have a cassette of Bert playing a 40-minute set at a venue run by Incredible String Band founder member Clive Palmer’s Incredible Folk Club in Glasgow. Jansch only sang about six complete songs that night. The rest of the time he was playing a pastiche of guitar pieces and works in progress where he only knew a few verses. It was utterly spellbinding stuff. His eclectic mix of repertoire covering blues, traditional songs and his own work was always very guitar orientated. He built blues into ballads and the visits to Edinburgh from Davey Graham always saw a quantum leap in his guitar ambitions especially where jazz progressions crept in.
“These were very formative years for us all. We were playing a lower quality of instrument than those available to the beginners today, never mind being able to afford new strings! Better instruments eventually meant better playing and Bert proved that.”
“We were both inveterate doodlers”