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Dazzling Stranger
The guitarist's guitarist and the songwriter's songwriter, the legendary Bert Jansch has influenced artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Paul Simon, Jimmy Page, and Neil Young. Born in Edinburgh in 1943, Jansch became a pioneering figure during Britain's 1960s folk revival. In 1967, he formed the folk-jazz fusion band Pentangle with John Renborn; they enjoyed international success until 1973, when Jansch returned to a solo career. Unassuming and enigmatic, Jansch has withstood the vagaries of fashion, being continually rediscovered and revered by new generations of artists. Dazzling Stranger is the story of a true original of British music.
- GenresMusicBiographyNonfiction
398 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 5, 2016
Portrait of Man in Corner with Guitar
This is meant as an ode to those sitting in the corner holding a guitar. To those who are always there, foisting a soundtrack on our lives. Perhaps we would like to think these guitarists of ours perfectly in tune with the surroundings, playing louder, softer, dipping, sweltering, whenever required. One thing we know is they are certainly not playing songs. They go in fits and starts, always abandoning: cantus interruptus. At best they noodle, mumbling to themselves all the while. They are there yet not there; part of the furniture.
I remember a long train ride from Amsterdam to Budapest. Sixteen hours and we got blindingly drunk in the first of them. A relentless summer sun came and beat down on us, and turned our buzz into hangover faster than I'd ever experienced before or since. There was more than a sense of hell to the whole thing, with our overzealous boozing figuring as original sin. But in the midst of this, in the passageway of the train, outside the cabins, sat this guy. Yes, he just sat there, slumped on the ground, picking his flamenco guitar for hours on end. He seemed to occupy a different realm than us, a little piece of heaven, with light accumulating in that hallway caught as it was between two panes of glass. He would pick up a melody, circle around it, then lose interest halfway, turn to something else. Sometimes a melody would last seconds, sometimes it seemed errantly to go on for hours, like a printer that keeps churning out the same page of text. It was as if he was mocking us, his stops and starts a fitful incarnation of time which just wouldn't start flowing. But the music had a beautiful, lucid quality. It reminds me of those harmonica scenes in Once Upon a Time in the West – that tranquility offset against the violence, that sense that music can create a rift within any moment, any tragedy, and find something quietly transcendent inside of it. Music as the redeemer.
This is also what you get listening to Bert Jansch: he creates a little pocket of space that subdues all – soft vocals, seemingly fluid guitar lines that drift off into dead-ends, pauses, short instrumentals like nocturnal ideas that one does not wish to pursue in the mornings. Everything is blissfully fleeting. In Dazzling Stranger, his biography of Jansch, Colin Harper keeps pointing this out: he was a simple man, a gardener who liked to play a game of darts in the local pub. As such, Jansch strikes me as the musical equivalent of a Robert Walser. This idea of the minor writer. Bert Jansch was a major figure in a minor way.
The New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff once wrote about guitarist Loren Connors that he “plays notes so slowly that you wonder if he's losing his way.” I can't tell if this was meant as criticism per se, but for me it strikes to the heart of the beauty of Connors' music. Ratliff relates that later in the set Connors moved to the shadowy corner of the stage, keeping to himself with his guitar as Keiji Haino – his musical collaborator on that night – lets loose.
What does this corner signify? Perhaps that the music does not require a host, a singular source to attach to, a creator. It can float from its dark corner as if it was in the air all along. This is something I've come to find increasingly appealing in music: a lack of self-awareness. Music as self-evident sound.
Harper is a competent biographer, and any faults I find here are largely in the genre's conventions: the biographical things, the endless listing of records, friends, dates, the chronicling of endless facts, producers, girlfriends. I guess it is this completionism that bothers me: stories told not for any intrinsic value or for their relation to a narrative, but for their belonging to a life that someone somewhere decided must be utterly excavated. What is mostly interesting here is the tension that arises from a subject that keeps hiding from its chronicler.
Harper solves this by broadening scope and sketching the British folk scene at large. Of particular interest to me were the parts about Davy Graham, another enigmatic Man in Corner with Guitar. The book at some point begins to remind me of that Woody Allen film about the gypsy jazz guitarist who when queried keeps referring to himself as the greatest guitarist alive – “except for this gypsy in France” (Django Reinhardt). In Dazzling Stranger, while Harper gets a lot of people on record about Jansch' greatness, there might be more still who confess almost sheepishly that, actually, Davy was the best. I love that anecdote here where all the folkies are jamming and then Graham starts playing and they lay down their guitars one by one. It turns out Graham is playing the whole of Ravel's Bolero, all the different instrumental parts, on one guitar.
But Graham was a Walser-type of guy too. Whenever careers were being made, he was always off gallivanting in the north of Africa. Because, you know what? Any kind of fame requires you to leave that corner where nobody bothers you while you sit out your love affair with your guitar. Some people are just best in the corner and, more importantly, most comfortable.
And thank God for that.
This is meant as an ode to those sitting in the corner holding a guitar. To those who are always there, foisting a soundtrack on our lives. Perhaps we would like to think these guitarists of ours perfectly in tune with the surroundings, playing louder, softer, dipping, sweltering, whenever required. One thing we know is they are certainly not playing songs. They go in fits and starts, always abandoning: cantus interruptus. At best they noodle, mumbling to themselves all the while. They are there yet not there; part of the furniture.
I remember a long train ride from Amsterdam to Budapest. Sixteen hours and we got blindingly drunk in the first of them. A relentless summer sun came and beat down on us, and turned our buzz into hangover faster than I'd ever experienced before or since. There was more than a sense of hell to the whole thing, with our overzealous boozing figuring as original sin. But in the midst of this, in the passageway of the train, outside the cabins, sat this guy. Yes, he just sat there, slumped on the ground, picking his flamenco guitar for hours on end. He seemed to occupy a different realm than us, a little piece of heaven, with light accumulating in that hallway caught as it was between two panes of glass. He would pick up a melody, circle around it, then lose interest halfway, turn to something else. Sometimes a melody would last seconds, sometimes it seemed errantly to go on for hours, like a printer that keeps churning out the same page of text. It was as if he was mocking us, his stops and starts a fitful incarnation of time which just wouldn't start flowing. But the music had a beautiful, lucid quality. It reminds me of those harmonica scenes in Once Upon a Time in the West – that tranquility offset against the violence, that sense that music can create a rift within any moment, any tragedy, and find something quietly transcendent inside of it. Music as the redeemer.
This is also what you get listening to Bert Jansch: he creates a little pocket of space that subdues all – soft vocals, seemingly fluid guitar lines that drift off into dead-ends, pauses, short instrumentals like nocturnal ideas that one does not wish to pursue in the mornings. Everything is blissfully fleeting. In Dazzling Stranger, his biography of Jansch, Colin Harper keeps pointing this out: he was a simple man, a gardener who liked to play a game of darts in the local pub. As such, Jansch strikes me as the musical equivalent of a Robert Walser. This idea of the minor writer. Bert Jansch was a major figure in a minor way.
The New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff once wrote about guitarist Loren Connors that he “plays notes so slowly that you wonder if he's losing his way.” I can't tell if this was meant as criticism per se, but for me it strikes to the heart of the beauty of Connors' music. Ratliff relates that later in the set Connors moved to the shadowy corner of the stage, keeping to himself with his guitar as Keiji Haino – his musical collaborator on that night – lets loose.
What does this corner signify? Perhaps that the music does not require a host, a singular source to attach to, a creator. It can float from its dark corner as if it was in the air all along. This is something I've come to find increasingly appealing in music: a lack of self-awareness. Music as self-evident sound.
Harper is a competent biographer, and any faults I find here are largely in the genre's conventions: the biographical things, the endless listing of records, friends, dates, the chronicling of endless facts, producers, girlfriends. I guess it is this completionism that bothers me: stories told not for any intrinsic value or for their relation to a narrative, but for their belonging to a life that someone somewhere decided must be utterly excavated. What is mostly interesting here is the tension that arises from a subject that keeps hiding from its chronicler.
Harper solves this by broadening scope and sketching the British folk scene at large. Of particular interest to me were the parts about Davy Graham, another enigmatic Man in Corner with Guitar. The book at some point begins to remind me of that Woody Allen film about the gypsy jazz guitarist who when queried keeps referring to himself as the greatest guitarist alive – “except for this gypsy in France” (Django Reinhardt). In Dazzling Stranger, while Harper gets a lot of people on record about Jansch' greatness, there might be more still who confess almost sheepishly that, actually, Davy was the best. I love that anecdote here where all the folkies are jamming and then Graham starts playing and they lay down their guitars one by one. It turns out Graham is playing the whole of Ravel's Bolero, all the different instrumental parts, on one guitar.
But Graham was a Walser-type of guy too. Whenever careers were being made, he was always off gallivanting in the north of Africa. Because, you know what? Any kind of fame requires you to leave that corner where nobody bothers you while you sit out your love affair with your guitar. Some people are just best in the corner and, more importantly, most comfortable.
And thank God for that.
June 23, 2009
Hardly a myth-buster, Harper leaves Jansch's mystique intact by building an elaborate backdrop of intimately connected musicians and organizations before allowing his carefully drawn Bert, brooding and aloof, to drift through that mileau, influencing all and taking influence from none. The idea that Jansch emerged from the womb a fully formed stylist is reinforced by Harper's keeping his protagonist away from an instrument for as long as possible (Jansch doesn't own a guitar for the first hundred or two pages of the book and the coming and going of various instruments is followed closely throughout the text, provocatively supplanting the role that would be occupied by romantic or creative relationships in a more typical portrait). Carefully researched, strongly opinionated and informed by engaging fiction-writing devices, Dazzling Stranger is my favorite music bio to date.
March 23, 2021
I'm old enough and lucky enough to have sat at Bert Jansch's feet many times at the Horseshoe in Tottenham Court Road and at Greek Street's Les Cousins, both in the heart of London.
That was back in the mid- to late- 1960's.
I sat in awe as he played and sung. The songs spoke to me, his guitar playing entranced me.
One night he announced the forming of a group, Pentangle. That too had magic in those early days.
This book brings back so many wonderful memories of the people and places.
Now as I write this I'm listening again to Bert's recordings. They are so special, unique.
Bert was an icon, a legend. Yet he never seemed to realise that. He just got on with his music.
This book is wonderfully researched. If you have any interest in the Brritish folk revival and in Bert Jansch himself, do buy it.
That was back in the mid- to late- 1960's.
I sat in awe as he played and sung. The songs spoke to me, his guitar playing entranced me.
One night he announced the forming of a group, Pentangle. That too had magic in those early days.
This book brings back so many wonderful memories of the people and places.
Now as I write this I'm listening again to Bert's recordings. They are so special, unique.
Bert was an icon, a legend. Yet he never seemed to realise that. He just got on with his music.
This book is wonderfully researched. If you have any interest in the Brritish folk revival and in Bert Jansch himself, do buy it.
February 12, 2021
This read like a really long Wikipedia article. There was too much about boring stuff like contracts and management and gigs and not enough storytelling. I admit I decided to read this more for interest in Anne Briggs, who was part of the music scene Bert Jansch started out in and heavily influenced and was influenced by Jansch. I knew barely anything about Jansch. But that's not why I found a lot of this book uninteresting and hard to get through. It was really the approach by the author. About a month before reading this, I read another biography of the folk music scene of the same period but in the U.S., Positively 4th Street, about Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Farina, Bob Dylan, and Richard Farina (Mimi's husband). I knew a little more about some of those people, but not much and I didn't even like Dylan after reading it. But that book was so good at storytelling and explaining the dynamics between the 4 "leads" as well as the music scene at the time. It was enjoyable reading that book, but this one felt like a chore. There were sparks here and there in some of the descriptions of the '60s folk music scene in Britain and the characters who formed it, but more often than not we got all kinds of obsessive info about gigs and such that added nothing to the overall story much less anything revealing about Jansch and his music.
September 4, 2015
The author has done a great job here. Bert Jansch himself couldn't remember much of what took place or doesn't want to say. Added to this, he absents himself from the whole celebrity thing and is relatively inconspicuous. Therefore this book is like a sculpture of the whole folk movement in the 50s - 70s, all the main movers and places are there and biographically covered. If you chisel all of them away, you are left with the man himself. After reading this book you are not all that closer to knowing how he ticked, but Harper has gone as far as possible. Some people are natural enigmas.
November 7, 2011
Not just a biography, and a good one, of the man himself, but as the title suggests a history of that strange phenomena. Bert outlasted several revivals; fashions came and went, and he just went on dazzling. Harper's summing up is fair and while he obviously admires his subject he doesn't overlooks the faults.
September 2, 2013
A fascinating tour of 50 years of the British folk music scene filled with stories about Bert Jansch and his contemporaries. Names drop on every page. Dylan,Donovan, Jimmy Page... It really opens up the early development of rock and the folk and blues influences and the ways Jansch and his guitar style were formative.
January 7, 2013
I found this book very hard work. I also found the subject of the book very uninteresting. So I would not recommend this book.
January 1, 2026
Interesting biography of the legendary folk musician. I like Bert Jansch anyway but came out the other side of this with a deeper appreciation and respect for the man.
The first couple of chapters provide an in depth backstory of how the British folk movement developed throughout Britain from the late nineteenth fifties onwards via the influence of Ewan McColl and Chris Barber’s championing of American artists such as Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie Magee.
Very little of this lengthy introduction features Bert Jansch and it would seem that his early life isn’t particularly well documented anyway.
While I appreciated the detailed back story I did find it a bit of a slog to get through this first section and it was only when the story caught up to the mid sixties period that I started to read with a less forced sense of interest.
That said there wasn’t as much information about Jansch as I would have liked and I think this is because he really was a man of so few words and modest ego who seemed determined to let his music speak for itself.
I think with so many musicians associated with the sixties, seventies and beyond we’ve become accustomed to hearing them say so much about themselves and their opinions on practically every aspect of their lives that it’s actually more surprising when such a hugely gifted and creative soul shows such stoicism.
In this way Jansch came across to me as a figure of a sort of quietly defiant rebellion against the more fevered egos that inhabit the upper echelons of the music business as it was back then.
That’s not to say Jansch led an especially quiet life. His excesses during the heyday of the Pentangle era and beyond are up there with that of any rock star of the era which was for me a surprising takeaway from reading this.
The latter part of this book was quite dry, focusing on management, contracts, gigs and little else.
It seemed like the author was very pre occupied with Jansch being commercially successful, while my take was that Jansch seemed above those kind of constraints and didn’t necessarily need or want them.
It seems to me something of a trope that the people who tend to write biographies often seem only able to judge an artists worth by how much money they make or how many records they sell or how constantly innovative they are.
The uniqueness of the man as an individual and the emotional content and resonance of his music seemed to get lost or feel like it didn’t count for as much.
You may also come away from this book with the impression that folk music completely ended in Britain by the mid 70’s.
Overall I was glad I read this and if one of the functions of a good biography is to increase one’s interest in the chosen subject, then this book worked for me even if it did require me to read through the authors lines at times.
The first couple of chapters provide an in depth backstory of how the British folk movement developed throughout Britain from the late nineteenth fifties onwards via the influence of Ewan McColl and Chris Barber’s championing of American artists such as Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie Magee.
Very little of this lengthy introduction features Bert Jansch and it would seem that his early life isn’t particularly well documented anyway.
While I appreciated the detailed back story I did find it a bit of a slog to get through this first section and it was only when the story caught up to the mid sixties period that I started to read with a less forced sense of interest.
That said there wasn’t as much information about Jansch as I would have liked and I think this is because he really was a man of so few words and modest ego who seemed determined to let his music speak for itself.
I think with so many musicians associated with the sixties, seventies and beyond we’ve become accustomed to hearing them say so much about themselves and their opinions on practically every aspect of their lives that it’s actually more surprising when such a hugely gifted and creative soul shows such stoicism.
In this way Jansch came across to me as a figure of a sort of quietly defiant rebellion against the more fevered egos that inhabit the upper echelons of the music business as it was back then.
That’s not to say Jansch led an especially quiet life. His excesses during the heyday of the Pentangle era and beyond are up there with that of any rock star of the era which was for me a surprising takeaway from reading this.
The latter part of this book was quite dry, focusing on management, contracts, gigs and little else.
It seemed like the author was very pre occupied with Jansch being commercially successful, while my take was that Jansch seemed above those kind of constraints and didn’t necessarily need or want them.
It seems to me something of a trope that the people who tend to write biographies often seem only able to judge an artists worth by how much money they make or how many records they sell or how constantly innovative they are.
The uniqueness of the man as an individual and the emotional content and resonance of his music seemed to get lost or feel like it didn’t count for as much.
You may also come away from this book with the impression that folk music completely ended in Britain by the mid 70’s.
Overall I was glad I read this and if one of the functions of a good biography is to increase one’s interest in the chosen subject, then this book worked for me even if it did require me to read through the authors lines at times.
March 25, 2018
Colin Harper covers the British folk music revival and the life and music of Bert Jansch. Good overview even if the sections on the general revival are slow going and throw a significant number of names at the reader. But you do come away from this book with a better understanding of what the scene was like in the 60s. Once Harper covers the disbanding of The Pentangle in '73, Jansch is the sole subject. Fame is important to Harper and he devotes much of the book to the business ups and downs of Jansch's career in music. At times it seems more important to the author than it had been to Jansch. It also seems as if the continuing folk scene in Britain, although a much more underground scene than in the 60s is omitted from the narrative. One could come away from this book thinking folk music is completely gone from Britain other than the recognition of the formerly better known performers. Innovation seems to be the standard by which Jansch's music is measured which limits appreciation for a significant part of his output. That seems in keeping with a critics approach to art but does not speak to the emotional reaction this reader had to much of the music of Bert Jansch.
January 9, 2024
Competently written, lots of facts without much analysis, and a thorough exploration of the folk scene in England and Scotland. Some unfamiliar names, some fun rabbit holes, but a level of detail that I found it difficult to really take in.
I love Jansch and Pentangle is one of my favorite bands - maybe my most favorite - and I suppose its impossible to capture in the words the emotions that great music creates. When you add to that, a person who probably expressed themselves best through song and was a functioning alcoholic for many decades, perhaps it's foolish to expect much illumination from any book.
I love Jansch and Pentangle is one of my favorite bands - maybe my most favorite - and I suppose its impossible to capture in the words the emotions that great music creates. When you add to that, a person who probably expressed themselves best through song and was a functioning alcoholic for many decades, perhaps it's foolish to expect much illumination from any book.
January 19, 2021
Missing the photos
Absolutely marvelous book, but it doesn't have the photos from the print edition, which should be a crime. Great read, though.
Absolutely marvelous book, but it doesn't have the photos from the print edition, which should be a crime. Great read, though.
July 14, 2021
This was a really interesting, engrossing read -- anyone with any interest in 20th century Rock / Folk / etc should definitely check this out.
I have a handful of Jansch and Renbourn albums here, but knew very little about Bert tbh. The chapters on the Folk Revival, early days of Blues boom, etc in early 60s London and Scotland are fascinating as various characters - some names familiar; some not - wander in and out of the story.
Had no idea that Chris Barber - a guy I associate with the 60s Trad Jazz scene was such an influential player in the worlds of Skiffle, Blues, Jazz and UK Folk. Or that john Mclaughlin (Miles Davis' guitarist on Bitches Brew and other electric / fusion albums, and founder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc) started out in a Skiffle group!
Recommended.
I have a handful of Jansch and Renbourn albums here, but knew very little about Bert tbh. The chapters on the Folk Revival, early days of Blues boom, etc in early 60s London and Scotland are fascinating as various characters - some names familiar; some not - wander in and out of the story.
Had no idea that Chris Barber - a guy I associate with the 60s Trad Jazz scene was such an influential player in the worlds of Skiffle, Blues, Jazz and UK Folk. Or that john Mclaughlin (Miles Davis' guitarist on Bitches Brew and other electric / fusion albums, and founder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc) started out in a Skiffle group!
Recommended.
March 9, 2007
Useful but slightly lacklustre biography of the pioneering guitarist
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