Kittiwake

In mid- October The Swede post the title track from Bert Jansch's album Avocet in the Monday long song slot. It is indeed and long song, all eighteen minutes of it. The post is here. 

Avocet came out in 1979, a return to form for Jansch who had been a little out of sorts in the mid- 70s, living for a while in Los Angeles, returning home, splitting from his wife and then touring Australia and the Far East for several months. Together with violinist Martin Jenkins he toured Scandinavia and out there they began to develop some new ideas for songs. Once home they worked them up and recorded them as an album with Danny Thompson on board, bringing his innovative double bass playing. 

These became Avocet. The title track is eighteen minutes long, a tracks that shifts about and goes through phases, but always returning too the start. It's a sublime piece of modern folk music. There's nothing revivalist or twee about it- it two men creating new music at the end of a decade that had seen its fair share of changes. Avocet took up all of side one of the record. 

On side two there are five more songs, all named after British birds- Lapwing, Bittern, Kingfisher, Osprey (written by Jenkins) and Kittiwake. The songs, all entirely instrumental, start in folk but go off at tangents into neo- classical, skirt around jazz, drone and meditative- I hesitate to use the word ambient because they're not ambient at all- but you could slip them into an experimental ambient mix and they'd fit. The album was re- issued in 2016 and you can find it on Bandcamp with three extra live tracks recored in Italy. 

Kittiwake is the closing track, vibrating double bass strings and Bert's tumbling guitar playing, inventive and melodic. Lovely. I think Vini Reilly may have been listening to Avocet. 

Kittiwake

There's probably a post to be written by someone better qualified than me about an alternative/ secret history of the late 70s, music made miles away from the spotlight of punk, New Wave, new pop and all the exciting stuff that was going on that thrilled so many people. Far from this there was Bert Jansch and Avocet (recorded in 1978, released in '79) and John Martyn's One World (two years earlier, 1977). There are probably others that fit in a similar category, unfashionable and out of the glare of publicity and popularity but still sounding good today.