Salut! Folk

Andrew Curry writes: It’s hard to overstate how influential Danny Thompson was in the British folk scene, from his early days playing at Les Cousins with Alexis Korner, then Pentangle, to later playing with a huge range of folk artists, from John Martyn to Martin Simpson to Richard Thompson, and a lot more people in between.

He died last week, at the age of 86.

Thompson was also a member of the house band for the influential Aly Bain/Jerry Douglas music series Transatlantic Sessions. But he was a jazz musicians first, spending a decade in Ronnie Scott’s house band, and he spent the ‘60s as in-demand session musician, turning up and playing whatever the arranger had written on the charts, for singers such as Shirley Bassey and Matt Munro.

It’s hard to think of other bass players who have been as influential—maybe a handful of jazz players, such as Mingus and Jaco Pastorius, the great funk bassist Bootsy Collins, and Robbie Shakespeare come to mind, but it’s not a long list.

Looking back through our back numbers here at Salut!, I’m pleased to find that we gave him the credit he deserved.

Over the years I’ve seen Thompson in all sorts of venues, from big to small, with quite a range of players, and often not mentioned on the bill, and you’d know as soon as soon as you saw him on stage that you were in for a treat.

His record Connected, released in 2012, seems a good place to start, because Thompson put it together after John Martyn’s death. He worked with Martyn for decades, and didn’t think that the music played after Martyn died was the best from his career. As Mike Dennison put it in a review on the site:

This prompted him to assemble and release his own choice of tracks that would reflect his personal highlights from a long and distinguished career. He also hoped to make a few bob from the release while still alive to enjoy it.

Its 12 tracks represent collaborations with 12 different musicians—some well-known, some not—and there are some fine songs on the record. Thompson says on the sleeve notes,

This collection doesn’t feature me “flying about with me cufflinks caught in the strings”, as on my jazz recordings. I was honoured to serve these wonderful people and their songs.

All the same, the opening track, Hatmosphere, has a certain amount of musical showmanship on it. It’s a remix of some between-song chat at a gig, about hats. The bass playing is distinctive, but he says of his voice that he “Can’t even talk in tune.”

My favourite track on the record is Martin Simpson’s elegiac song for Martin Taylor’s son, One Day. But, really, the standout track is an exhilarating 13-minute jam, Outside In, with his long-term collaborator John Martyn.

Thompson introduces the record himself in a clip on youtube which skates through the different tracks.

Looking at my notes from a conversation between Joe Boyd and the sound engineer John Wood at Cecil Sharp House last year, I found a story by Wood about Thompson visiting Martyn after the latter had had his leg amputated. Of course, this was self-induced—it was a result of Martyn’s hard-drinking lifestyle—but he was still feeling sorry for himself:

As Danny went into Martyn’s room in the hospital, he said to John Martyn, “Haven’t they given you a parrot yet?” It could have gone either way. But after a pause, Martyn burst out laughing.

Thompson later went with Martyn to New York to collect his prosthetic leg. Wood added that Thompson had an instinct for how to help people come out of themselves. In a published piece on the site from that same conversation, about Nick Drake, I wrote this:

Drake would stay with Wood and his wife at their house in Suffolk, and Wood said that the bass player Danny Thompson—with his extrovert personality—was one of the few people who could get through to him. He wished he’d found a way to get them to work together more.

Hanging out with John Martyn had its downsides. Thompson spent much of the ’70s in a haze of alcohol, but sobered up in the ’80s and quite alcohol completely in the ’90s. And the 80s were a creative decade for him.

The fine music writer Richard Williams wrote a short obituary piece for Thompson on his Blue Moment blog, and pointed readers to Thompson’s LP Whatever, recorded for Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label in the late 1980s, as “maybe the best way” to remember Thompson. It manages effectively to combine both folk and jazz influences, which is not always a happy mix:

It finds him with a trio completed by two relatively unsung heroes of the scene, the wonderful Tony Roberts on assorted reeds, flutes and whistles and the terrific guitarist Bernie Holland. I remember giving it an enthusiastic review in The Times, commending its highly evolved fusion of folk materials and jazz techniques.

One of my own favourites from Thompson’s oeuvre is not really a folk recording at all, more a ‘world’ music collaboration. Songhai, also from the late 1980s, and also recorded for Boyd’s Hannibal label, is a collaboration between Thompson, the Spanish flamenco group Ketama, and the kora player Toumani Diabaté. It was successful enough to warrant a sequel, a few years later.

And looking through my record collection, I see that he was still working with jazz musicians in parallel with all of this. The ‘Whatever’ band had evolved by the time of Elemental in 1990, with John Etheridge on guitars and Paul Dunmall on saxes joining Tony Roberts. But musicians such as Stan Tracey, Alan Skidmore and Henry Lowther turn up as well, along with the Irish harp player Maire Ni Chatasaigh. Thompson wrote all of the tracks, and I see that my second hand copy had been marked down to £2 in Notting Hill’s Music and Video Exchange, perhaps because they didn’t know how to categorise it.

This reminds me that Thompson was also part of my route into jazz, introducing me to the music of Charles Mingus through Pentangle’s version of Haitian Fight Song. (The poet Adrian Henri helped with Mingus as well.) I guess there could have been a ‘Danny Thompson Band’, and it would be surely have been successful. But it’s pretty clear from interviews, such as the one he gave to Prog when Connected came out, that he preferred to work across genres—the Acoustic Who at the Emirates one day, playing with Charlie Parker’s sideman Red Rodney another.

As he told Prog’s Mike Barnes,

“If you play jazz and play with a folk group, it helps both types of music,” he replies. “But jazz people in the clique said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ I said, ‘Because it’s great.’ They said, ‘But what about bass solos?’ I said, ‘That’s all I do!’”

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Also on Salut! Folk: Five Leaves Left: how Nick Drake came of age

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