Music

Folk, it seems, is the new jazz. The makers of last year’s ‘Jazz Britannia’ documentary have just completed a three-part ‘Folk Britannia’ series for BBC4; hip indie kids who used to give props to Alice Coltrane are now namechecking Bert Jansch; trendy boutique imprints like Honest Jons are making exquisite Soul Jazz-style compilations of rare, spooky folk gems.

This four-CD set is a drop of the harder stuff. It’s arranged thematically: Disc One is a fine mix of seminal Brit-folk legends (Copper, Briggs, MacColl, Carthy, Renbourne, Graham, etc); Disc Two is a so-so collection of post-Dylan singer-songwriters (with Jansch, Donovan and Denny joined by jazzier wildcards like Nick Drake and Bill Fay); Disc Three ploughs through the curate’s egg that is folk rock (Pentangle, Prelude, Fairport, etc); and Disc Four collects spooky ‘acid folk’ tracks by the likes of T-Rex, Vashti Bunyan and the Incredible String Band.
The key difference between jazz and folk is that hard bop needed a funky backbeat to be marketed as ‘acid jazz’. Conversely, the coolest ‘acid folk’ here is drumless, spartan, scary, austere, drone-laden and medieval, while the worst tends to be the jaunty and joyful (Lindisfarne, Gryphon, Dransfield, Trees, etc). Which means that you have to edit out rather a lot of dross from this warts-and-all compilation.