I was very sad to hear of Danny Thompson's passing a couple of weeks back, at the age of 86. Unless you've tried particularly hard to avoid him, it's difficult to imagine that you don't have something or other in your collection featuring this extraordinary double bassist, whose career goes back as far as the early 1960s. I was fortunate enough to see him play with Richard Thompson on a number of occasions, with whom he also recorded, but he's also all over records by the likes of John Martyn, Nick Drake, Talk Talk, Tim Buckley, Kate Bush, The Incredible String Band and, of course, Pentangle, amongst numerous others. His first appearance in my own record collection occurred as far back 1972, when I picked up Rod Stewart's marvellous 'Every Picture Tells a Story' LP and he popped up again in 1974 on T.Rex's 'Zinc Alloy & the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow'. These days I have any number of records featuring Danny's talents sitting of my shelves, including a couple by fellow Pentangler Bert Jansch. Chief among them is 1978's 'Avocet', an instrumental paean to a selection of various sea and wading birds. The title track is just sublime.
