This 37-track, two-disc set is the most comprehensive compilation of
John Renbourn's recording career to date. In one sense,
Renbourn can be defined as a traditional British folk guitarist, but within that category, he has managed a wide variety of different recording projects over 40 years. There are the solo guitar albums, of course, but then there are also duo albums with
Bert Jansch and
Stefan Grossman;
Renbourn's major group affiliation with
Pentangle; his own band projects, the
John Renbourn Group and
John Renbourn's Ship of Fools, and even prominent work as a sideman for other artists. The anthology attempts to deal with all these variations by dividing his work up stylistically so that, generally speaking, the first disc features
Renbourn as a folk and folk-rock artist, and the second one covers his efforts in Old English classical folk styles. Naturally, some of his early solo work, tracks with
Jansch and
Grossman, and
Pentangle selections fit into the first CD, while later solo efforts and the
Renbourn Group and
Ship of Fools projects go on the second CD. Beyond that, compiling
Renbourn effectively becomes a matter of choosing appropriate tracks, and the compilers have included many obvious selections along with a few obscurities. It would be possible to create an entirely alternative compilation that also showcased
Renbourn well, and with three CDs to work with, an even better anthology would result. But this collection represents a reasonable selection and arrangement of
Renbourn's recordings, boiled down to two discs. ~ William Ruhlmann