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Old 08-06-2017, 12:03 PM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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I worked on this book myself (with a group of other transcribers). Rolly Brown was one of our consultants, and kindly allowed us to refer to his transcriptions.

But we didn't take any tab we were given or found (and there were probably over 100 from various sources) as gospel. Everything was checked and double-checked with the recordings, using transcription software - corrections were common (even to the one or two which purportedly came from John Renbourn himself, via his workshop colleagues). Where available, video of live performances was used to check fingering. (Where no video was available, plenty of debate ensued about exactly how Bert would have played this or that, and how much it mattered if we tabbed it differently: how Bert might have done it, or how we'd do it ourselves?)
The whole process, including drafts and consultations between our group and with our consultants, took well over a year.

Our claim is that this is the most authoritative collection of Jansch transcriptions ever produced. It's just sad that it wasn't done in his lifetime, as he always wished. (He did collaborate with Doug Kennedy on a book produced in the early 80s, which was - of course - extremely accurate, and which we referred to, but that's been long out of print and suffered from cheap production values.)

The full list of tunes (drawn from the favourites of our transcription group) is as follows:

ALICE'S WONDERLAND
ALMAN
ANGIE
BIRD SONG
BIRTHDAY BLUES
BLACKWATERSIDE
BLUES RUN THE GAME
THE BRIGHT NEW YEAR
CHAMBERTIN
CRIMSON MOON
THE CURRAGH OF KILDARE
THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FACE ('73 version)
FRESH AS A SWEET SUNDAY MORNING
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
IS IT REAL
JOINT CONTROL
MOONSHINE
NEEDLE OF DEATH ('74 version)
ORLANDO
PEREGRINATIONS
REYNARDINE
RUNNING FROM HOME
SOHO
STROLLING DOWN THE HIGHWAY

Orlando and Soho include John Renbourn's parts. All songs include vocal notation and full lyrics. The guitar parts are in notation and tab, and every piece has accompanying background notes and technical tips for players.

Proceeds from the book go to the Bert Jansch Foundation, a charity set up (by Geraldine Auerbach, mother of Bert's late widow Loren) to sponsor young musicians.

If this book is successful, I'm hopeful a volume 2 can be produced - we have plenty more favourites in backup! We've also talked about making individual transcriptions available online through some kind of subscription system, but that's on hold at present (it may present too many problems for copyright and licensing).

There's also been talk about whether we should produce videos of each piece. That would take a lot of additional work, of course. My own attempt at Chambertin is on youtube, but (although I tried) it's not exactly as tabbed in the book, which follows the LA Turnaround version note for note, with reference to an informal video of Bert demo-ing parts of it for Gordon Giltrap (and forgetting some of it himself!).
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Last edited by JonPR; 08-06-2017 at 12:16 PM.
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