1001 Albums You Must Hear Before Die: 170. Pentangle – Basket of Light (1969)

 

One of the triumvirate of early British folk, Pentangle are more jazz-folk than the folk-rock of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. Not surprising perhaps since they feature guitar virtuouso Bert Jansch, with drummer Terry Cox often following the tune rather than driving it, in jazz rather than rock fashion. It’s impossible to hear their famous Light Flight without thinking of Dave Brubeck, for example, and their takes on traditional songs such as The Cuckoo (a waltz-like refrain given great lightness with sparse instrumentation) have a slightly loose jazz feel to them as well.

Singer Jacqui McShee has a classic high female folk voice, but she is lighter in timbre than Fairport’s Sandy Denny – to me they’re like English versions of Joni Mitchell vs Joan Baez respectively – and this again give Pentangle a more delicate sound compared to Fairport Convention. Jansch’s complex guitar picking is not quite so evident as on his solo album, and is never really given the fore, but instead is woven neatly into the complexity of each song. Actually, the album title, A Basket of Light, is a very apt description of a typical Pentangle song – a complex interweaving of very delicate elements.

I’m a sucker for a bit of modernized folk, and so I loved this one.