by Charles Siegel
There can have been very few musicians who played such key roles, in so many different bands in so many different genres, as Danny Thompson. When he died at 86 in September, music lost one of its great connectors.
I first learned of Thompson as a freshman in college, when my roommate introduced me to Pentangle. There had never been a band like Pentangle, and there really hasn’t been one quite like them since either. They were an utterly unique melding of folk and jazz. The band’s guitarists, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, were two of the leading English folk guitarists of the day when Pentangle was founded in 1967. Terry Cox was an established jazz drummer, and Jacqui McShee was an up-and-coming folk singer.
At the center of it all was Danny Thompson on bass. By 1967 he’d already had a wide variety of musical experience, not to mention a turbulent life.
Born in Devon, he never knew his father, a miner who joined the Royal Navy at the start of World War II and was killed in a U-boat attack. His sister died not long after, and he and his mother moved to Battersea, then a rough area of London yet to be gentrified.
He was a good soccer player — good enough to play for Chelsea’s youth teams. And he was a good boxer, winning 22 of 23 fights. But already, music was becoming his consuming passion. By the time he was a young teenager he had tried guitar, mandolin, trumpet and trombone. He told an interviewer that one reason he gave up trombone was his boxing, “because a smack in the chops is not very good for that.”
After all of those instruments, he settled on the double bass. Like pretty much every young musician in England in the 1950s, he started out playing in skiffle bands, and like everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimmy Page, he was inspired by Lonnie Donegan.
From there, he played in strip clubs in Soho and on American military bases. In keeping with his already ornery personality, in 1957 he was arrested for failure to report for national service. Three days before he was sent to prison, he married his girlfriend, and then was posted to Malaysia for two years, where he took up the trombone again in an army band. Read more »
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