John Renbourn

John Renbourn is one of those guitarists whose identity becomes clear within just a few carefully played notes. His guitar playing can sound precise without becoming stiff, and complicated without making complexity the point. John William Mark Renbourn was born in London on August 8, 1944, and became one of the musicians who helped expand the language of British acoustic guitar during the 1960s. Blues, jazz, British traditional music, ragtime, classical guitar and early music all found their way into his playing, yet I rarely hear him simply switching from one style to another. What makes John Renbourn distinctive to me is the way those influences gradually became part of one very personal guitar vocabulary.

Renbourn’s early development coincided with a particularly fertile period in the British folk and blues scene. He had studied classical guitar, but American blues and folk became equally important influences, with players such as Josh White and the extraordinary British guitarist Davy Graham helping to broaden his idea of what an acoustic guitar could do. He worked with American singer Dorris Henderson and recorded There You Go with her in 1965, while his own first recordings for Transatlantic Records were already showing a musician unwilling to stay inside conventional folk boundaries. His self-titled debut appeared in 1965, and Bert Jansch played with him on two tracks. Renbourn and Jansch were sharing a flat and spending a great deal of time playing together, and their musical relationship became one of the most important partnerships in British acoustic guitar.

Two Guitars, Two Personalities

The 1966 album Bert and John is one of the records I would recommend to anyone trying to understand Renbourn. Jansch and Renbourn were both adventurous guitarists, but they did not sound interchangeable. Jansch often brought a rawer attack and strong rhythmic urgency, while Renbourn’s playing could be more measured, detailed and harmonically controlled. On pieces such as “Tic-Tocative” and “No Exit”, I enjoy listening to the separation between the two instruments as much as the compositions themselves. On a transparent system or good headphones, you can follow the individual lines and hear how the guitarists leave room for one another instead of turning the performance into a competition.

That partnership became part of something larger when Renbourn and Jansch joined singer Jacqui McShee, double bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox in Pentangle. The group brought together musicians with backgrounds in folk, blues and jazz, and its first album, The Pentangle, appeared on Transatlantic in 1968. By Basket of Light in 1969, the combination had become remarkably confident, and “Light Flight” gave the group wider exposure after being used as the theme for the BBC television series Take Three Girls. What interests me most about Pentangle is the space in the arrangements. Thompson’s bass, Cox’s percussion, the two guitars and McShee’s voice can remain clearly identifiable even when the music becomes rhythmically intricate, which makes the better Pentangle recordings particularly rewarding through high-end audio equipment.

Renbourn continued his solo work while Pentangle was active, and this is where his musical curiosity becomes especially clear. Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & ye Grene Knyghte, released in 1968, moved much further into early English music while still containing folk, jazz and blues elements. I find it an important album because it shows that Renbourn was not interested in treating traditional material as something fixed. His guitar could move from the Elizabethan world of William Byrd to material associated with jazz and soul without the album feeling like a random collection of exercises. The sound is relatively straightforward by modern audiophile recording standards, but the articulation of the strings, the small changes in attack and the interaction with flute and percussion make it excellent reference music for judging midrange transparency and transient detail.

The Guitar Becomes a Small Ensemble

For me, The Lady and the Unicorn from 1970 takes this side of Renbourn even further. The repertoire reaches into medieval and Renaissance music and includes arrangements connected with composers such as Guillaume de Machaut, John Dowland and Johann Sebastian Bach, alongside traditional material and Renbourn’s own title piece. Terry Cox, Ray Warleigh, Tony Roberts, Dave Swarbrick and other musicians add percussion, flute, violin, viola and concertina around Renbourn’s guitar. What I value here is his restraint. He does not seem interested in proving that an old piece can be made modern; instead, he uses the acoustic guitar to make different periods and traditions communicate naturally.

The long sequence incorporating “My Johnny Was a Shoemaker”, “Westron Wynde” and “Scarborough Fair” is especially useful for hearing what he could do with texture. There is plenty happening, but the music does not feel crowded. With good stereo imaging, the instrumental colours are easy to separate and Renbourn’s guitar remains defined without being unnaturally pushed forward. I also like the physical quality of his playing: fingers contacting strings, notes beginning cleanly, bass strings carrying body underneath finer upper-register detail. This is the kind of acoustic music where improvements in speakers, headphones, amplifiers or DACs can reveal more information without changing the essential character of the performance.

After the original Pentangle broke up in the early 1970s, Renbourn had more room to pursue his own mixture of traditions. The Hermit, released by Transatlantic in 1976, is another album I would choose as a serious introduction. Much of it is spare and guitar-centred, and the programme includes Renbourn originals alongside music associated with the Irish harper and composer Turlough O’Carolan and material drawn from older lute sources. Compared with some of the richer ensemble recordings, I hear more of the mechanics of Renbourn’s playing here: the balance between bass and treble strings, the controlled decay of notes and the tiny pauses that prevent technically difficult passages from becoming mechanical. It is not music that needs high volume to make an impression.

His career continued to widen rather than settle. Renbourn worked extensively with American guitarist Stefan Grossman, formed the John Renbourn Group with musicians including Jacqui McShee, Tony Roberts, Keshav Sathe and Sue Draheim, and later collaborated with Robin Williamson. He also returned to formal study, spending several years at Darlington College studying composition and early music as well as instruments including sitar and shakuhachi. That willingness to remain a student of music is important to my understanding of him. Even after establishing an international reputation as a guitarist, he continued looking outside the familiar acoustic guitar world for new structures, sounds and ideas.

There were later Pentangle reunions too. In 2007, the original members received a BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and performed together, followed by further reunion concerts. Renbourn remained active as a solo performer and collaborator into his final years, including touring with his old friend Wizz Jones. He died at his home in Hawick in the Scottish Borders on March 26, 2015, aged 70. Their final recordings together were subsequently released as Joint Control in 2016, giving his long career an unexpectedly appropriate final chapter: two guitarists listening closely to one another rather than one musician demanding the spotlight.

For someone new to John Renbourn, I would probably begin with Bert and John to hear the excitement of two major guitar personalities developing side by side, then move to The Lady and the Unicorn for the breadth of his musical thinking and The Hermit for a clearer view of Renbourn himself. Across those records I hear blues phrasing, folk traditions, jazz freedom and centuries-old European music being absorbed rather than merely displayed. His recordings can also be extremely useful for audiophile listening because acoustic guitar exposes tonal balance, attack, resonance, dynamics and recording space with very little to hide behind. More importantly, the musical substance remains interesting after the hi-fi evaluation is over. For me, the quality that best explains John Renbourn is his control: not control used to show how difficult the guitar can be, but control used to make complicated music sound completely natural.

HiFi’ve, Ronald – Your EarFluencer