I get a little monomaniacal about my favourite artists. When someone's my favourite, I take their recommendations pretty much as gospel. Also — and I know this is wrong, but who cares — as a key to the secret code that will help me understand their wonderful work. Thus I have a whole shelf of my collection for CDs I got because of Stephin Merritt.
Nowadays any mention by one of the Alasdairs — Roberts or Maclean — will send me off to eMusic, Spotify or YouTube in search of a singer I'd never heard of before. This is good. It stretches me in directions I would never have considered by any other means. Duncan Williamson and Stanley Robertson, for example.
Thus it was that Alasdair R says of Bert Jansch in this interview "I have been listening a lot to his record Avocet recently… beautiful." When I read that that, at the start of the year, Avocet — and much of the rest of the Jansch catalogue — was £2.98 on Amazon. I nearly bought four albums, but thankfully the thought of having to write about them all here put the brakes on that idea.
Still, Alasdair was right about this one. Quite beautiful, and easy to like — which isn't always the case with his tastes: often you have to work quite hard. The CD has literally been sat on top of my player since I got it, and has been my first choice when I have no other listening "programmed" (admittedly Music Arcades makes such occasions rare).
I never knew there was music quite like this. It's on the fringes of that thinly-populated jazz-folk genre — see Odetta, Astral Weeks and Happy Sad. Yet even in that minority group, it feels marginal. I love the fluid meshing of Bert's guitars, Danny Thompson's great bass and the fiddle'n'flute combo from Martin Jenkins (how come I've never heard of him before). It all breezes along as though they're just jamming, with a medley of tunes and jigs bubbling up and then morphing into something else. I thought I caught the tune Alasdair uses for The Burning of Auchindoun, and maybe I did, or maybe my ear just imagined it.
(Looking for some more buying hints? Here's a bundle of more recent tips from Alasdair)
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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