Official Luthiers Forum!

There's a post about Steve Jobs in the Off-Topic section, but, oddly, no mention of Bert Jansch. He's the reason many of you picked up the guitar, so I'm posting it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oc ... sfeed=true

Heard that on the news this morning...

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Just last week I saw Bert on the Later...with Jools Holland show, playing with Pentangle. It was from about four years ago. Sad that another hero is gone.

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

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"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

I saw him last December 9 at Johnny D's in Somerville, MA. My seat was about 5 feet from him. He was an absolutely amazing guitarist. I'm so glad I had the chance to see him. He seemed so humble and appreciative of the response to his music. He will definitely be missed.

Matt

Indeed. I got a chance to meet him when he played Vancouver a few years back. Very genteel gentleman. Played a Yamaha, which I thought was pretty illuminating as to how so many great guitarists care bupkiss about guitars... My bass player interviewed him for a local magazine, and passed on Bert's home phone number. Fortunately, I had just enough tact to never use it, tempting though it was. I had already thanked him for his influence in person.

We have lost a genius in Bert Jansch, and he was an inspiration to generations of not only guitarists, but musicians.
Yamaha was, of course, his sponsor.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

All my heroes are gradually going, I knew he contracted lung cancer a couple of years ago, but his death is still a shock.

I knew Bert well in the late 60s and 70s, when he came down to London from Edingburgh to play at the London folk clubs, he was a member of the great guitar pantheon of the time along with Martin Carthy and Davy Graham. Bert's 'Rosemary Lane' album was probably the greatest influence on my musical life of all, I'd just become a reasonable but average player and set myself the challenge of playing the whole album, Bert gave me a lot of his time to realise that dream, showing me how he did things and how to play in altered tunings.

With the explosion of Folk Rock, (Fairport Convention, with Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Dave Swarbrick and Steeleye Span with Martin Carthy and Maddy Prior), Bert was an original member of the third great band Pentangle with John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Jacqui McShee. The three bands gave us the freedom to play traditional British folk music, in a new way. But it is as a solo player that I will miss him most, a true artist and friend.

Colin

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I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.

"And Christ receive thy soul..."
from the Lyke-Wake Dirge as performed by Pentangle
pvg