Bert Jansch & John Renbourn Bert & John (4*)
The fourth album in Bert Jansch's extensive canon, 1966's Bert And John was recorded with fellow guitarist John Renboun in the living room of the flat they shared in St Edmund's Terrsce, on the edge of Primrose Hill. While some of their peers (Davy Graham, for example, according to Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music) were heading for the middle of the road and television exposure Jansch and Renbourn were still in the process of figuring out what was possible around the fringes. Renbourn had already been working with Jacqui McShee, with whom the duo would achieve major success in Pentangle, but here, in contrast to the reinterpretation of traditional material on Jack Orion, recorded around the same time, the content is weighted towards the jazz and blues side of the spectrum.
It seems incongruous to have something called Piano Tune played on two guitars (and to be frank about it I can’t hear this as a piano piece) but it, like most of the tracks on the album, is a Jansch - Renbourn co-write. The exceptions are the Charlie Mingus Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Anne Briggs’ The Time Has Come, Jansch’s Soho and Renbourn’s Along the Way.
Joe Boyd in White Bicycles says he thought the likes of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn were just emulating American noodlers such as John Fahey and Sandy Bull, but there’s actually a bit more than mere noodling going on here.
Given the nature of things in the Little House of Concrete there’s no guarantee that anything on this album will end up in the Top 1500 Most Played playlist, but at the same time anything on the album will, under the right conditions, slip through on the iPod without prompting a shuffle forwards.
Recommended if you’re into fingerpicked guitar and want to check out an early collaboration between two of the best exponents of the genre.

Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabaté Kulanjan (3.5*)
If you could collect a dollar for every one of these American blues man reconnects with his African roots albums you'd probably have the readies to head out and buy a rather expensive bottle of something, but when it comes to that back to the roots bit Taj Mahal has been doing it longer than most.

He's been visiting Mali since 1979, a good fifteen years before Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure's Talking Timbuktu which was the first of those exercises I encountered. As far as Taj is concerned he's descended from Malian griots, so on that basis a collaboration with kora player Toumani Diabaté, the descendant of seventy-one generations of musicians in a patrilineal line, looks like an obvious avenue to explore. If you're talking roots, that's serious roots.

Taj met Toumani as far back as 1990, but this set, recorded in 1999 in Georgia with half a dozen Malian griots (Toumani Diabate, kora; Kassemady Diabate, vocals, guitar; Ramatou Diakite, vocals; Bassekou Kouyate, ngoni, bass ngoni; Dougouye Koulibaly, kamalengoni, bolon; Lasana Diabate, balafon; Ballake Sissoko, kora) offers an interesting blend of American and African influences melding the blues, ragtime and folk themes from the New World with timeless elements from the sub-Saharan region.

The blend is easy enough to sample on the album's opener, Queen Bee, a track Taj has cut several times, with Ramatou Diakite's improvised Wasulunke vocal skipping along as Diabate tinkles away before Taj cuts in with the more familiar vocal line. It’s probably the most striking track, and while the the blues themes through the rest of the album are fairly familiar (Catfish Blues, Take This Hammer), the Malian influences transform the likes of Ol' Georgie Buck into a celebration of the songs’ African roots.

Apart from the reworkings of familiar material the Malian love ballads, hunter's songs, and songs of praise to departed heroes work on their own level and the two elements combine seamlessly to create a sound that works as a fusion of ancient traditions and music that’s obviously descended from those traditions but has been shaped by outside influences while retaining the traditional base.

The combination makes for an interesting listen that I’d like to have heard a decade before I actually did and would probably have brought my ears to a couple of subsequent favourites (Toumani Diabate in particular) early enough to have them as a key ingredient in the Tuesday night Fools Gold or the Sunday afternoon session on the local community radio station.