I don’t usually record covers of other people’s songs (the only other one here is Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’) but ‘Jigsaw Puzzle Blues’ has always been a favourite of mine ever since it was released in 1969 as the B-side of Fleetwood Mac’s mega-hit single ‘Albatross’.

It’s a very clever, albeit short, instrumental involving multiple key changes and modulations between major and minor, with riffs reminiscent of old 1930s syncopated jazz.  In fact, someone has pointed out on YouTube the tune’s very strong resemblance to a 1933 'Jigsaw Puzzle Blues' by "Joe Venuti and the Eddie Lang Blue Five".  It seems highly likely that Danny Kirwan liked this swing-era music and wrote his own version, and it can’t be seen as outright copying as this was a standard blues chord sequence back then and hundreds of tunes were done to it.  But you can certainly hear that Danny probably copied some of the clarinet solo licks starting at 2:02 in the video and at 2:06 there is also the distinctive bass run John McVie performs on the Fleetwood Mac version.  The YouTube video is here.

Technical notes:

The backing track was from a Guitar Techniques magazine CD (so don’t blame me for the slight tempo increase near the end!) and I played the tune on my Epiphone Flying V, DI’d into Sonar X1D via my mixing desk. I used the excellent Scuffam S-Gear guitar processor plugin with a factory patch and added a slight bit of room reverb using the Pantheon plugin in Sonar.  The final mix was mastered using Ozone5 software with some limiting added at the end by Fabfilter’s ProL limiter plugin.