Anyone Interested in a Pentangle Album by Album Thread?

I'm in the midst of preparing my essay on Reflection and have a quick question. Does anyone have the booklet for The Time Has Come handy? I know that Duffy Power is credited with harmonica, but I can't recall if he's actually on "Reflection" or "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" . . . sounds like Renbourn's harp playing to me, based on how he sounds on Faro Annie.

Can anyone confirm that Duffy Power appears anywhere on Reflection?

 

I did a quick scan of the Reflection section of the The Time Has Come booklet and didn't see a Duffy Power reference, but maybe I missed it.

 

I second most of what Mr. Flowr says here. "A Maid in Bedlam" is by far the most engaging of all of Renbourn's solo albums (other than "The Lost Sessions" which has some great psych on it). It is really a step above, and yet is also more traditional than some of the Renbourn stuff. "The Enchanted Garden" is a good step down, and "Live in America" is really for the true fan or completist, in my opinion.

 

Just a quick update: I'm going to be travelling for a few weeks and a great deal of professional and personal stuff has suddenly cut back on my online time. I will try to get the Reflection essay up post-haste, but I'm not sure how often I will actually get online in the next 2-3 weeks.

In the meantime, to keep things going (and I know we've covered at least some of this before), what is your favorite Pentangle album? least favorite? favorite track?

I'm showing my hand a bit, before writing about all of these records down the road, but

Favorite Album: Basket of Light
Least Favorite: So Early in the Spring
Favorite Track: It changes from time to time, but most often it's "Street Song" from Open the Door

 

Favorite Album: Sweet Child (largely because it's the first album - and singles - performed live, with an extra studio album to boot!).

Least Favorite: Anything post-Solomon's Seal. Although I enjoy some of the material beyond the 'classic' era, I feel the band had a finite creative lifespan, and I focus upon 1967/68-72.

Favorite Track: 'Bruton Town' (live), 'Travelling Song' (live), 'Waltz' (live), 'The Trees They Do Grow High', 'Once I Had A Sweetheart', 'House Carpenter', 'Omie Wise', 'Wedding Dress' (live). Just one? Hell, most everything of theirs is a favourite.

 

Sweet Solo Salvations...

I must respectfully disagree... I think Faro Annie is a bloody brilliant album, a lost classic even, and it is my fave Renbourn solo Lp, then The Lost Sessions (which I wisely got John to sign...) I always pair up Faro Annie with my fave Jansch solo long player, Moonshine, both dark and mysterious works the reward repeated listenings and open minds...

 

Whilst Awiting Thine Flowering of Henri...

I was in Santa Cruz yesterday, and Streetlight had all three of the new Bert Jansch "reissues" --first time on Cd for all three, for $12.99 each--LA Turnaround, Santa Barbara Honeymoon, and A Rare Conundrum, so I picked up all three. Had never heard LA Turnaround, so played that one first, last night, drive home, and man was it a super sweet listen... I'd highly recommend this disc to any fan of The Pentangle or fine acoustic guitar music in general. Good stuff...very nice to have it available again after all these years (LA had never been seen in 20 years of looking until now)

 

Sorry if this has already been posted, but I just stumbled across page which has lots of interesting info on the mastering/restoration work that was done for the box set:

http://www.westburn.force9.co.uk/colinharper/page18/page24/index.html

I'm still wondering if the Sanctuary remasters of Cruel Sister and Reflection (and Bert Jansch's Rosemary Lane) improve on the Line issues. I have the Line CDs of these three albums, and none of them sound that great to me.

 

Whew. I'm back in the world after 4 weeks roughly away from civilization, and will recommence, after many delays, the album essays shortly.

Mrbill: how are the bonus tracks on the Jansch reissues? I haven't heard them yet.

Zongo: I agree with your assessment of the Renbourn Group records, although I'm not a huge fan of Lost Sessions, but I haven't listened to it in a great while - must revisit it soon, I suppose.

imagnrywar: I haven't heard the Sanctuary Reflection, but the Sanctuary Cruel Sister sounds better to me than the Line issue - more airy and dynamic, more presence as they say.

 

Yeah, I recently picked up the remasters of Cruel Sister and Reflection. They are FAR better than the Line CDs. Listening back to back, it's obvious that the Line discs are smothered in noise reduction. I was never too impressed with those two Line CDs, but I didn't realize just how bad they were until I did a direct comparison with the remasters.

 

At last . . .



Pentangle: Reflection

Produced by Bill Leader

Terry Cox – Drums, percussion, piano, and vocals
Bert Jansch – Acoustic guitar, banjo, and vocals
Jacqui McShee – Vocals
John Renbourn – Acoustic and electric guitars, harmonica, sitar, and vocals
Danny Thompson – Double bass and viola


Transatlantic TRA240 (November 1971) (UK)
Reprise RS6463. (US)

CD Reissues on Line, Transatlantic, Castle Communications

1. Wedding Dress (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 4:48
2. Omie Wise (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 4:23
3. Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 4:06
4. When I Get Home (Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 4:55
5. Rain and Snow (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 3:49
6. Helping Hand (Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 3:27
7. So Clear (Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 4:49
8. Reflection (Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 11:14

The sleeve of Pentangle’s fifth album, Reflection, is made up, front and back and gatefold, with photos of the band members, individually and collectively, posed and candid, in the studio and out, in their homes and in the English countryside. In effect, it is both scrapbook and, more importantly, patchwork quilt, a visual manifestation of the record within. Both sleeve and record seem a reaction (or more kindly, a companion) to the Albrecht Durer prints (no band photos) and strictly British repertoire of its predecessor, the monolithic Cruel Sister.

It could be said that Reflection, in title, and contents, literally “reflects” – the band was in transition, with at least two members deeply unhappy about the direction that had been followed on the previous album. Further, the songs included share a twin thematic notion of reflection – melancholy and tradition joined inexorably.

In a notably melancholy 1969 essay entitled, “Notes of a Temporary Resident,” John Updike writes of his year as an American in London that, ““Insofar as the popular music here [London] is not derivative, it is Elizabethan balladeering beamed back after centuries of fermentation in the Appalachians, by way of Elvis Presley.” If Cruel Sister represented the Pentangle’s investigation, roughly, of Elizabethan balladeering (“Lord Franklin” postdates the Elizabethan period by several hundred years), then Reflection is the Pentangle’s attempt to deal with what Updike calls the “fermentation in the Appalachians.” Ignoring the transmutation of traditional balladry into rock by Presley and others, the Pentangle draws on the earlier American folk revival, not that of Peter, Paul, and Mary, or the Kingston Trio, but of the rawer, less-packaged revivalisms of Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, and Peggy Seeger. Most importantly, though, Reflection contextualizes its four slices of Appalachian balladry with four original songs that address the band’s complex relationship with America.

The Pentangle spent a good deal of time in 1969 and 1970 touring the United States, appearing at Carnegie Hall, the Fillmores (opening for the Grateful Dead at the show that became Live/Dead), and the Newport Folk Festival, as well as an assortment of clubs, ballrooms, colleges, and even high schools. By most accounts, what they saw in the States left them, particularly Bert Jansch, overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted by the rise of and opposition to the Woodstock Nation, the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam movements, and the peculiarly ugly period which they viewed firsthand.

To what has been referred to as the “Sixties hangover,” we can add to the factors that produced Reflection the internecine squabbling that Cruel Sister engendered. Colin Harper compares the March 1971 sessions for this album to the Beatles’ Twickenham sessions: with Jansch, Renbourn, and McShee variously becoming difficult or absent while the others waited for recording to proceed. The Pentangle, unlike the fabs, seemed to handle the tensions with more aplomb, however, correcting the imbalance of Jansch, Thompson, and Cox in the final product that was so apparent on Cruel Sister. Four traditional songs, all American (Appalachian, specifically) in origin are placed alongside four band compositions – one each composed by Jansch (“When I Get Home”), Cox (“Helping Hand”), and Renbourn (“So Clear”), and one band composition (the title track) based upon Jansch’s early unreleased instrumental “Joint Control” (a version appears on the compilation of early live Jansch tracks entitled Young Man Blues). By placing a completely American traditional repertoire side-by-side with four melancholic (lyrically and musically) originals, Reflection also stands, inevitably, as a statement about America, the mirror-like “reflection” of the Euro-centric Cruel Sister and, as American journalists termed them, this “most English of bands.”

Added to the band’s previous sonic palette are harmonica (played by Renbourn), piano (Cox), and viola (Thompson). Jansch’s banjo reappears, and Thompson frequently plays bowed bass, sometimes overdubbed doubly or trebly. There are also a profusion of group vocals, with Renbourn’s and Cox’s relatively untrained voices lending a communal, informal feel to the proceedings. Perhaps reflecting (I feel as if I am writing one of those Kinks articles in which all c’s are changed to k’s) the influence of the Grateful Dead, the drumming is more forceful, more rock-inspired than on earlier albums, and the soloing is generally West Coast modal (“Reflection” itself is, for the most part, a one-chord blues) rather than the bop inspired passages on the debut and Sweet Child.

Reflection, then, is one of Pentangle’s finest albums, with sterling performances from all of the band members, and yet another reinvention of their sound that incorporates more rustic elements, but also more production polish (it is the original line-up’s only album recorded with 16 track facilities), although its sales and contemporary critical reputation were disappointing in the UK (in the US, it was their only charting album, reaching the lower reaches of the Billboard top 200). It is arguably their last classic album, the favorite of Jansch biographer Colin Harper, and a sonically gorgeous statement on the recursive nation of producing music, especially producing inventive new music with the same group of musicians after four very full years.

The album begins with the traditional “Wedding Dress”, the only song on Reflection that does not directly address death or loss. Based upon a 1957 version by Peggy Seeger, its jubilant hopefulness of the preparations for a wedding are delivered in rollicking and very rustic fashion with lead vocals from McShee and backing vocals from Renbourn and Cox,. This rustic, very American flavor is anchored by a tight arrangement that intertwines Jansch’s banjo, Thompson’s bowed bass, and Renbourn’s acoustic guitar over some very muscular drumming from Cox. Subtextually, it also seems, by its presence as opening track to reference the band’s union/wedding of British and American traditions: a spectacular choice as album opener.

“Omie Wise” confirms that Reflection is going to be an album rooted in Americana; it is a 19th Century ballad from the Carolinas, detailing a real incident: the murder of Naomi Wise by Jonathan Lewis in 1807. The Pentangle’s arrangement is based on Doc Watson’s 1964 Newport Folk Festival performance, released on The Essential Doc Watson, to which is added a second guitar part and subtle rhythm section. Jansch’s vocal achieves something similar to what Bob Dylan’s earliest and most-recent work has done: it sounds unbelievably ancient, as if plucked wholesale from 1807 North Carolina. It must be noted, too, how much Jansch sounds like Dylan on this album, slurring and stretching syllables in unpredictable ways, throwing away lines meaningfully, and investing seemingly unimportant words with new importance (Dylan himself recorded “Omie Wise” on what has come to be known as the Minnesota Hotel Tape.)

The next track, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, enjoyed a good deal of popular attention in 1972 in a version by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Based on a hymn written by Ada Habershon and Charles Gabriel, re-arranged and appropriated by A. P. Carter in the 1920s, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is the embodiment of American traditional song in its fractured hopefulness, with lyrics that address physical death and the possibility of an after-life. The Pentangle version is, by their standards, not a drastic reinvention, but rather a simple reading with trademark flourishes – Cox’s nimble fills, Renbourn’s wah wah solo. An amusing clip resides on youtube of a seemingly very “altered” Pentangle miming to this recording, which was a single in the UK and Europe.

Jansch’s “When I Get Home” is the album’s first original, and expands exponentially the already-established theme of recursiveness or reflectivity: it is a first person narrative that couples an account of drunken flights of fancy with childhood memories, and includes one of *the* classic Jansch lyrics: “Now, dear old Uncle Adam had it right, baby, from the start / He never did get married nor did he break any poor girl’s heart / All his life worked his fingers to the bone(s) / Got drunk and he came home stoned, but you couldn’t really call it his home / And I wish that I could be like him.” The Dylan-esque rush of singer and band through the first four lines above, followed by the relatively calm lengthening of “And I wish that I could be like him” perfectly depicts the band’s (and their milieu’s) furious rush through the interior and exterior turmoil of the period. “When I Get Home” has proved a durable enough statement of artistic purpose that Jansch has frequently revisited it in concert.

The Appalachian “Rain and Snow” was already a Grateful Dead concert staple as “Cold Rain and Snow” at the time the Pentangle opened for them in 1969. The copious setlists compiled by the Dead’s archivists fail to produce direct evidence that they are the source of this version, but, even if they aren’t, there is some evidence that Garcia and company had some influence on the changes within the Pentangle’s sound. Live versions of “Pentangling”, especially, from the 1970 tours feature Garcia-like soloing from Renbourn, and the piece ballooned to close to twenty minutes in concert. “Rain and Snow”, while subtly suggesting the band’s kinship with the Dead (who were, after all, working on their own jazz-meets-bluegrass fusion), also calls up the phantom figure of Bob Dylan yet again. The voice and face of the American folk revival had singled out this song for inclusion in the 1963 screed “For Dave Glover”: “I can't sing "Red Apple juice" no more / I gotta sing "masters a War.” Dylan had once (and again much later) argued that traditional songs continued to speak to the present; in 1963, abandoning traditional song for “protest music,” he’d taken particular umbrage with this song’s “Ain’t got no use for your red apple juice.” Here the Pentangle reclaims it (as the Dead had before them), incorporating the banjo-sitar duo approach of “House Carpenter” along with piano (Cox) and some extraordinarily funky figures in the rhythm section.

Side Two begins with Terry Cox’s songwriting contribution, “Helping Hand”, which seems, of the four originals, the most rooted in the failed ideals of the 1960s. His wispy voice, over McShee’s wordless angelic one, offers another musical representation of social chaos in need of the simple lyrical sentiments of helping one another. Lyrical content of this sort that now seems dated and santimonious in lesser hands (I’m thinking of the Youngbloods' version of “Get Together”, for example) manages to sidestep both by accompanying the plea for understanding with a tricky, oddly harmonized, multi-part opus that changes tempo and time signature enough times to manifest musically the very difficulty inherent in “understanding.” It’s not for nothing that at the Pentangle’s 2007 BBC reunion, Terry Cox stated that Steely Dan is his favorite band.

The first and only John Renbourn original to appear on a Pentangle album, “So Clear” is gloriously melancholic in a fashion that seems unique to the early 1970s. Perhaps it is the failed spirit of the hippie / youth movement that resulted in three such classic songs coming out of the same period: “So Clear” shares the misty-eyed resolve of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” (written earlier, but not released by its author until 1971) and the Rolling Stone’s most melancholy moment, “Wild Horses.” Renbourn’s song can be interpreted at face value as a break-up song, but it also seems, like the Cohen and Stones songs, to be a farewell to a way of thinking or a mode of being. Sonically, it blends the rich texture of Thompson’s bass, Jansch’s acoustic, and Renbourn’s electric with a very heartfelt Renbourn vocal.

The final track, “Reflection”, begins with nearly two minutes of Danny Thompson presenting a Pentangle equivalent of Jimmy’s Page’s guitar orchestra on “Achilles Last Stand”: a chorus of bowed and plucked basses establishing an irresistible slow groove before Cox and then McShee enter. Another multi-part composition, “Reflection” suggests an apocalyptic (“the guns of Heaven ringing in my ears”) companion to the debut’s “Pentangling”, in which the light/dark, Heaven/Hell medievalisms of the earlier song are recast against a meandering modal vamp instead of a more structured bop theme-and-variations. "Reflection" follows the lyrical structure of blues but lingers on one chord: a blues with no changes. Renbourn and Cox both take lengthy solos, and Cox lends harmony vocals to McShee’s lead. The result is an eleven minute tour-de-force that is as unique to the post-America, post-Sixties Pentangle as “Pentangling” was to the 1968 band: a hopeful, but frayed synthesis of England and America, folk balladry and modal jazz as mutually-dependent, equal and opposite mirror images of one another: reflections, if you will.

*************

Vinyl issues on Reprise and Transatlantic both sound very good; the initial Line CD reissue is pretty heavily no-noised, but the more recent Castle/Sanctuary version remedies this. There are no bonus tracks on any of the reissues, although the boxed set The Time Has Come includes alternate takes of “So Clear” and “Reflection”.

 

The Prog Sun Rung...

Just got back myself from a five day, 2,500 mile jaunt to Pueblo, Colorado and back via, Reno, Green River, Durango, Cedar City and Lancaster.... boy am I trashed, but I am happy to see you back, HF, and to see a long essay for me reading on my fave Pentangle long-player, cant wait to dive in, but I must until Sunday at least...

As for the Jansch reissue, only ever heard SB Hunny on Lp before, so the LA Turn as a real head spinner and I love it to death, a great album, and I like the bunus goodies as well, on both discs, have not got to Rare Cunn yet...


welcome back miestro,



cheers,

mrbill

 

mrbill: thanks for the welcome back! I'm hoping to get back to the normal pace of this thread and should have the next film soundtrack - for Christian the Lion up by midweek. I'm curious where Reflection fits into other people's Pentangle pantheon; I think it's a very fine album, but I still prefer the debut and Basket of Light, and I known it's Mr. Bill's fave. Anyone else?

 

I actually prefer Reflection to Basket of Light. I just love the beauty of Renbourn and Jansch's playing on this one. DT's bass playing is magical on this album. Love the cover too,very dated but beautiful.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken is done in such a nice way. Now that ,this album has been brought up I can't get this one outta my head!


I have an original Reprise pressing and I love it...have to find where I have it so I can be treated to its magnifigence once again!

 

So Clear... Indeed...

HF,

I finally had a chance to read through your always amazing, informative and impressive essay, this time on Reflection, and all I can say again is 'well done sir!' Amazing stuff, and so educational, your roots are showing. I knew nothing of the Dead connextions at all, and that is intriguing and makes sense now, Cold Rain and Snow-wise (Om) and soloing... Love the banjo-sitar interplay on that one, always a fave pentagling movement for me, and you're spot on about When I Get Home and So Clear, two tracks I used to play all the time on late night radio, and the main two reasons this is my fave PT long-player... the lyrics on both strike a golden chord writ through my heart... stunning, Bert and John at their peaks, lyrically... and being as it is from 1971, this album first well into my oft-transmuting, and ever-evolving theory/paradigm of Rock's peaks and valles... great stuff, HF, we art lucky and honored you have it posted here first, sure to be in the book someday....

 

Mr. Bill:

Thanks for the kudos: much appreciated. I think "When I Get Home" and "So Clear" definitely fit the "peaks and valleys" idea - they're both filled (along with "Helping Hand") with the weariness of the ending of rock's golden late 60s and they fit more with the singer-songwriter movement of the early 70s than they do with anything on the Pentangle albums that preceded them.

I'm at work now on a brief essay on the soundtrack songs for Christian the Lion (I want to watch the film again before I finish it off) and hope to have a full-on essay on Solomon's Seal up by the end of the weekend.

Cheers!

 

DT's bass playing! Magical, indeed, especially on the intro to the title track.

 

Well, since you ask....

Although it wasn't the first Pentangle album I loved, Reflection is one of my two favorites (along with Solomon's Seal). Absolutely great, every song interesting, some of the songs among the best they did. Reflection itself with loooong spaced-out jamming. Very high album. To me it feels like the fully matured version of what they started out to do with those first few albums.

 

Oh, by the way, I picked up the LA Turnaround new CD also - fantastic, really fine. I think it might be the one Jansch album I had never heard before, for some reason (maybe rarity of the vinyl). Exceeded my expectations.

 

I'm in the same boat, and really loving it, never heard this one (LAT) until now, and I have 50 Bert Lps and Cds easy... This is one of his best... Up there with Moonshine and Rosemary Lane!

 

Also, the "A Maid That's Deep In Love" CD on Shanachie sounds excellent. Probably even a bit better than the remasters in my opinion. It has most of Cruel Sister and Reflection.

 

I don't have Cruel Sister and Reflection so I can't comment on those albums but that is certainly not the case with the Line CD of the first album, The Pentangle. That CD sounds beautiful and there is just as much hiss as the Castle remaster but it sounds much warmer and more natural. I think the remaster sounds a little too harsh and bright in comparison.

 

Yes, it appears that the Line discs must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

 

Really enjoying this thread. I'm just getting back into this band, Jansch, Renbourn, Brit folk etc... Of the classic period I only have Cruel Sister, which I have on lovely Transatlantic vinyl and quite like and a CD comp.

So, I'll soon be ordering up the Reflection and LA Turnaround remasters. Basket of Light is on the way too.
I've never heard these album and I'm pretty excited about immersing myself in all things Pentangle for awhile.

 

Pentagle Revisited...

Been on a bit of a mini-Pentangle Renaissance myself this week. Spured on by the Bert Jansch threader who liked The Ornament Tree, I pulled it out, then all my Bert Jansch Cds--turns out I have 30! And I persued them all last night. Then it was John Renbourn's turn, only10 Cds of his. But late last night I put on my fave, Faro Annie and really enjoyed it on my Siennies...lovely album

Next up is a revisiting the Pentagle albums proper, and I really need to write up a stirring defense of Reflection, my fave, before henryflower comes back to Solomon's Seal, Now where has that Henry got off to???

Ledsox, you are in for a treat when you get those other Cds and get to explore them.

cheers,

mrbill