Ralph McTell & Wizz Jones - Joint Control

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A bit of class

I really like this album.  Ralph McTell and Wizz Jones are two of the quiet greats of British acoustic guitar over the last half-century and this is an album of unflashily excellent musicianship.  The programme is a variety of stuff from traditional blues to Townes van Zandt, all arranged and played excellently. There's a simple joy in some of the blues work and also some real social bite and contemporary relevance in songs like Woody Guthrie's Deportees. 

I saw the two of them recently in concert and what came over strongly was the sense of two very fine musicians, utterly comfortable in each other's company and simply enjoying playing music together.  Something similar infuses this album.  It's not a ground-breaking piece of work, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable, quietly brilliant bit of class, which I can recommend warmly.

(I can also wholeheartedly recommend Joint Control, the album which Wizz made with John Renbourn shortly before Renbourn's very sad death.  It's another cracker.)