Bert Jansch
Jack Orion

No one should deny themselves the opportunity to encounter Bert Jansch's acoustic guitar, undoubtedly one of the greatest interpreters and figures in British folk. In addition to the wonderful works with the Pentangle, he, who was called by Neil Young the "Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar," has often gifted us with delightful solo works.

"Jack Orion" from 1966 is an album with a repertoire almost entirely made up of traditional pieces (excluding the signature of Ewan MacColl on a piece of high instrumental tension, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face") splendidly reinterpreted by an artist in a state of grace, capable of giving us in a clear and incredibly immediate way a blend of arrangements, sounds, and fantastic fingerpicking techniques that border on jazz in its broadest and most evocative meaning. Accompanied by John Renbourn's guitar on four tracks and replaced by the latter in the opening "The Waggoner's Lad," where he himself manages to add a touch of mastery to the banjo (as well as in the track "900 Miles" found in "It Don't Bother Me," an excellent record immediately preceding this), Jansch builds the entire work around the epic and expanded reinterpretation of the love and betrayal story of the title track, a variant of "Child Ballad 67 Glasgerion" and a symbolic track for a generation of contemporary and later folksingers, just like the famous "Black Water Side" from which Jimmy Page would draw inspiration for "Black Mountain Side" and the nervous "Nottamun Town," a very popular song in the Appalachian Mountains whose original melody is the basis of Bob Dylan's "Masters Of War."

Highly recommended album to all those who fully appreciate the constant and positive flow of sensations that these records can offer us.