“I had letters threatening me with death for getting Bert Jansch to play through an amp”: The life and wild times of Danny Thompson, the legend of upright bass who “brought greatness to everything he played”

Danny Thompson wears a NY varsity jacket and pork pie hat, and in a garden chair, holding his bow. His upright bass is in the background.

First, a disclaimer: any attempt to exhaustively chronicle the life and times of the late Danny Thompson is a fool’s errand. The talismanic British upright bassist – who died September 23, 2025 at the age of 86 – filled his years with music and misadventure on the grandest scale, lending the fluid thrub of his instrument (a great brown barge nicknamed ‘Victoria’) to a head-spinning thicket of projects and collaborators.

It speaks to Thompson’s versatility that fans have long debated not only the main event of his six-decade career, but even the genre he operated within. Should the headline be his provocative late-’60s work with prog-folk iconoclasts Pentangle? The seminal Five Leaves Left (1969) and Solid Air (1973) albums recorded respectively with the ethereal Nick Drake and Thompson’s fellow carouser, John Martyn?