Starting off the solo acoustic set with a stunning version of the title track from that personally life-changing little slab of wax, Sir Bert - hey, he’s royalty in my book, anyway - was clearly accompanied by a supernatural being or two. How else shall I explain the spine-tingles that followed? Fylgia, I say, fylgia! (Bless their spectral lil’ hearts.)

From that pin-drop-possible opener - the crowd was the quietest and most reverent I’ve seen in ages, a quality that Jansch commented upon with great appreciation at several points - our hero went off on a veritable history of folk music through the ages, performing songs of his own creation along with those of some his contemporaries and some from before his time. Sounds dry and dour, you say? Bite your tongue: folk doesn’t have to be a serious, stern-faced affair, as witnessed in Jansch’s charming storytelling and sharing-a-pint delivery. Such introductions made the frequently confessional ballads all the more effective.

Examples? How about an aching version of “My Donald,” a mournful tale of loneliness from the perspective of a whaler’s wife, written by Scottish friend Owen Hand? The incongruity of an obviously male voice singing a woman’s lament fades out of focus in such able hands, and better yet, Jansch prefaced the song with a chuckling anecdote about narrowly escaping his wife’s plans to take them on a dreaded whale-watching expedition during their visit to San Francisco. Crowd favorite “Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning” was introduced by way of a story involving fellow Pentangler John Renbourn, the two of them getting drunk in a Paris café and becoming increasingly more confused by the passers-by. Women wearing loaves of bread for hats are involved, as are beehived-sophisticates with mice in their hair, and for a minute there it feels like we’re witnessing an older version of Robyn Hitchcock, spiraling off into gloriously ludicrous tangents at the drop of a hat. After sucking us into the absurd surrealism of the story, Jansch announced, “This song has nothing to do with that story,” and launched into an astonishingly tender rendering of the classic, leaving us breathless and wet in the eyes.

“Beth Orton isn’t here tonight, so I guess I’ll do this one,” he joked at the start of “Katie Cruel” - an Orton-sung highlight from his audience-expanding The Black Swan of last year - and as much as I do adore that particular version of the traditional ballad, Jansch added an extra dose or two of gravitas to his reading, a troubadour who has seen it all and endured it all. “The Auld Triangle” - also included on that same album - was given an equally weighty treatment, albeit without the teeth-bared “jingle-bloody-jangle” snarled out by Shane MacGowan in the Pogues’ version I had memorized back in high school, clueless as I was about the tune’s significance at the time. Beloved Irish bard Brendan Behan wrote it, about corporal punishment. Huh. And somehow I missed it?! I guess I wasn’t the sharpest 16-year-old out there, was I?

Come encore time, cries for “Needle of Death” - a signature Jansch song in a catalog brimming with stunners - pinballed around the audience, and for a millisecond, some of us held out hope that maybe just maybe tonight we’d be treated to a performance of the classic, covered by everyone from Roy Harper to Yo La Tengo.

“Oh, I haven’t done that song in 30 years,” he said laughing and headed into an elegant, gliding version of “Dragonfly.” Where do you go from there? Well, if you’re a master interpreter such as Jansch, you cap the night off by plunging deep into mythology territory with an exquisite, engrossing telling of the Robin Williamson-written “October Song”: “I met a man whose name was Time, And he said, ‘I must be goin,’ / But just how long that was, I have no way of knowing.” A tale of epic grandeur, seemingly possessing a wisdom older than dirt, the song made for one hell of a finale, and before the final chords even finished, we already knew it in our bones: this was all the magic we’re getting tonight. It was just as well: too much fylgia could be a bad thing, you know.