Renbourn Brings Folk to the People : His Guitar Has Been Heard Across 4 Decades, Around the Globe--and, Next, Corona del Mar

One wouldn’t want to accuse John Renbourn of obscuring the truth, but when the guitarist talks about British folk music of the past 30 years and its wide influence, there is something consistently missing from his accounts.

Renbourn speaks informedly of how, in the early 1960s, guitarists Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy wrested folk music from stodgy traditionalists, setting the scene on its ear with country blues and Eastern modal influences, and how the work of those players in turn influenced a generation of rockers and others, up through New Age music to the present.

But what he leaves out--doubtless due to modesty--is that most accounts place Renbourn squarely in the midst of those changes. His mid-’60s recordings were remarkably inventive and accomplished fusions of styles. Under his fingertips, the melding of traditional British music with blues, jazz and other sources didn’t seem a novelty; the musical barriers simply vanished.

In the late ‘60s he teamed with Jansch and others to form Pentangle, a still-further-ranging outfit that could play modern jazz excursions and 700-year-old ballads with equally spellbinding intensity. The band split up in the late 1970s, and Renbourn has only continued to grow and mature as a solo artist and in a variety of collaborations. His most recent recording, a 1993 collaboration with Robin Williamson called “Wheel of Fortune,” earned a Grammy nomination.

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Renbourn spoke by phone from London on Monday. He should by then have been embarked on a U.S. tour that brings him to Corona del Mar tonight. Instead he was waiting for a work visa, which was mired somewhere in the byways bureaucracy. He missed one stateside concert waiting for the visa to clear and found it necessary to travel from his Scotland home to London to queue up outside the U.S. Embassy.

It was simply a processing problem this time; he has had more ominous visa problems in the past. During the Reagan Administration, rules were tightened for issuing work permits to musicians, which made it a bureaucratic nightmare for all but the most successful acts to gain approval.

Such restrictions on foreign musicians ostensibly prevent American musicians form losing work to them, as if there’s an American legend of the British folk guitar we could see instead.

“Suddenly musicians had to qualify on three points,” Renbourn said. “You had to be preeminent in your field, vastly commercial and one other thing I don’t recollect. And it was very difficult. My visa actually got turned down. I think I was one of the first, if not the very first, to suffer it. As a result, everybody rallied around, and I got the visa, and there weren’t any problems after that.”

Such glitches aside, Renbourn is happy in his job. His may not be a familiar name with the embassy crowd, but he has sufficient fans to warrant his touring much of the world, from Sardinia to Tasmania. Though he has warm memories of scuffling in Soho with his guitaring contemporaries, he doesn’t miss that scene, because he feels it has only grown and expanded.

“I’m always quite taken with the way the folk movement has developed. In the ‘70s, when Pentangle split up, I went back to the folk clubs doing solo stuff and found I was working and traveling much, much more than I did in the band. Since then I’ve played every country in Europe several times. I go to Japan and Australia, New Zealand. And I see a wonderful thing happening in acoustic music. There has been a real blossoming.

“I also think it’s nice the way that people like Alex Di Grassi, Michael Hedges and Will Ackerman, the so-called New Age guys, have also gone on with ideas from Davy, Bert and Martin. The whole thing spreads and comes back.”

The idea of guitarists such as Renbourn earning a decent living, much less Grammy nominations, was beyond the reckoning of Renbourn and his compatriots in the ‘60s.

As an avid, classically trained young musician in London, Renbourn hadn’t considered earning a living with his guitar. Like seemingly an entire generation of British musicians, he went to art school. “And a year later,” he recalls, “I came out of art school without any real hope of making a living as a painter and found myself playing in the pubs just to survive.”

For a while, he wasn’t much more than surviving. There was an established folk scene in England, but it was a moribund one that didn’t welcome change.

“The main clubs then were under the auspices of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and also very heavily under the sway of Ewan MacColl (revered writer of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and father of rock singer Kirsty MacColl), and the general feeling was that they were preserving the tradition, and it was a very serious proposition.

“As a result guys like Bert, Robin and Davy Graham and other people who were playing guitar were considered to be total heresy, because the steel-string guitar wasn’t a British instrument to start with, and the music they were playing initially was American folk blues stuff. So the camps were really split but very much in favor of the traditionalists for a while.”

Though things never entirely thawed, the guitarists gradually gained acceptance after Graham, the leading English finger-style player at the time, teamed up for an album in the mid-’60s with traditional singer Shirley Collins, the “rose of English folk music.”

“And this was a terrible dilemma to the traditional camp because Davy was arranging these tunes in exciting ways that had never been done before, and they couldn’t ignore it,” Renbourn recalled with a laugh.

Not long after that, Jansch’s first album came out, attaining cult acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and influencing everyone from Donovan to Jimmy Page, whose “Black Mountain Side” is borrowed sizably from Jansch. When Renbourn recorded his first album in 1965, Jansch guested on a few tracks, and the pair soon recorded a still-stunning album of duets, released in the United States as “Stepping Stones.”

While dealing with music that was centuries old, the guitarists weren’t unaware of the revolutions going on in the music of their own era.

“There was so much happening at the time, and I think people were all influenced by each other. Parallel to the folk stuff we were doing in the clubs, there was the whole R&B; thing with the Yardbirds, the Stones, Manfred Mann and everybody also happening, and we were influenced by that.

“Equally, when bands like Led Zeppelin came out, and also, interestingly enough, the early Buffalo Springfield, they were taking ideas directly from Bert Jansch and Davy Graham,” Renbourn said.

In 1967 he and Jansch joined up with singer Jacqui McShee and jazz/R&B; bassist Danny Thompson (recently seen touring with Richard Thompson) and drummer Terry Cox to form Pentangle.

“The group more or less came about because Bert and I were playing a lot in a little basement club in Soho called the Cousins,” Renbourn recalled. “They used to run these all-night sessions, basically so you could stay in the warm all night long if you had no place to sleep. At the same time, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox were playing down there with (seminal London bluesman) Alexis Korner. So we got a little band together basically to play the long night through. Essentially it started off a loose band that would play extended things, mainly to last the night out, and it got more serious, and we began working on ideas.

“Danny and Terry came from a jazz and R&B; background, but there were enormous areas in common. They had worked on recordings of various traditional folk players, and Bert and I had been listening to Chico Hamilton, Charlie Mingus, Monk and a lot of other jazz players, so it was good.”

Like contemporary Fairport Convention, the group often looked to Celtic antiquity for its songs, but, instead of rocking up the bardic tunes, Renbourn and Co. were given more to jazzy acoustic improvisation. The late ‘60s were sufficiently eclectic to see them booked into the Fillmores and larger rock halls.

“It was strange but all very exciting. The first tours we did in America, somehow we were billed as an underground band, which was this sort of buzzword with a lot of groups in the old days. Our label, Warner Bros., classed us in there as well. So we shared bills with the Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Canned Heat, Spirit, Alice Cooper. They were pretty odd pairings.”

Renbourn has collaborated with a number of players in recent years, including acoustic player Stefan Grossman and jazz guitarist Larry Coryell, a Celtic-themed ensemble called Ship of Fools and, most recently, Williamson, best known for his eclectic, spacey folk group the Incredible String Band. Renbourn’s pet name for his collaboration with Williamson is the Impenetrable String Tangle. The Corona del Mar appearance will be a solo gig, but Renbourn is meeting up with Williamson in early June to tour the Eastern states.

After that, Renbourn hopes to make a record that will be a departure.

“I love performing on guitar,” he said, “but I’m more into writing music and have been doing this for years now. I’ve got a great backlog of arrangements for voices, string parts and all sorts of things that are not directly related to the guitar things I’m known for doing.

“There’s a plan afoot for me to go to Ireland in July to try to record a lot of the more complex, scored-out arrangements I have with some Irish players who sight-read and come from a traditional background. One piece is for four cellos, two shakuhachis (Japanese bamboo flutes) and guitar, and another piece for a group about the size of the Chieftains. It will be really exciting for me for these things I’ve been working on for years to finally see the light of day, I think.”

Though he enjoys the solitary pleasures of composing, he says, he has yet to tire of the touring that has been his life for nearly three decades--perhaps because he finds another kind of transport in his live shows.

“I find music absolutely captivating. If it’s a good night, if the sound is nice onstage and I feel good about playing, then it certainly takes me to another place. You can’t really describe it. I feel music is something very special, and it takes you wherever it takes you, to the music place. There isn’t anything like it.”

* John Renbourn plays tonight at 8 at St. Michael and All Angels Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive, Newport Beach. $12 to $14. (714) 662-3166.