Noted cultural historian and music critic Greil Marcus talks with composers John Corigliano and Howard Fishman about their respective projects based around the works of Bob Dylan.
Afterwards, pianist Stephen Gosling and soprano Amy Burton perform excerpts from Corigliano's 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and Fishman and his band perform several songs from their 'Basement Tapes Project'.
Bio
Amy Burton
Amy Burton is one of New York's most notable singers, at the Metropolitan Opera from 1993 to the present, and as one of New York City Opera's leading sopranos in over a dozen productions.
From her New York debut recital at the 92nd Street Y in 1997 to her appearance with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center this season, Amy Burton is a vital part of New York's cultural scene, performing with Lincoln Center Festival, The Great Performer Series, Miller Theater, Mostly Mozart Festival, Morgan Library, Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, New York Festival of Song, Lā Opera Francais de New York, and many appearances at Carnegie Hall, Weill Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Walter Reade Auditorium, Merkin Hall and Joe's Pub, to name a few.
John Corigliano
The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and
most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years.
Corigliano's scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, three Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award and have
been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and
chamber musicians in the world.
Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European
avant garde as from his American forebears.
Michael Daves
Michael Daves was born in 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Currently Daves lives in New York. As well as performing solo, Daves has appeared in public Tony Trischka, Chris Thile, Rosanne Cash, Natalie MacMaster, and John Herald (of the Greenbrier Boys).
Howard Fishman
Howard Fishman, composer, guitarist and bandleader, has come to be recognized as one of today's most agile interpreters of the American songbook. Whether he is performing his own compositions or drawing on a seemingly endless repertoire of American popular music, it is all filtered through a sensibility and aesthetic entirely his own.
Fishman's performances combine the exuberance and spontaneity of jazz with a storyteller's sense of drama, emotional depth and play.
The All-Music Guide has called him "an important force in creative music," and The New York Times has written that his work "transcends time and idiom."
Stephen Gosling
Pianist Stephen Gosling is a ubiquitous presence on the New York new music scene, and has also performed throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia.
His playing has been hailed as "brilliant," "electric," and "luminous and poised" (New York Times), possessing "utter clarity and conviction" (Washington Post), and "extraordinary virtuosity" (Houston Chronicle).
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.
Marcus was born in San Francisco. He earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone (where he was the first reviews editor, at $30 a week) and other publications, including Creem, the Village Voice and Artforum.
Marcus is the author of Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces and Invisible Republic, among many other books.
Mark McLean
Mark McLean began his career at age nine as a gifted classical pianist but by age fourteen had started a second career playing drums. By the time he was eighteen, the drums eclipsed the piano as McLean's voice for musical expression and he soon was playing with fellow Canadian and jazz icon, Oscar Peterson.
Mclean has been described as 'an intelligent, immensely talented young musician with a curious mind and a listening ear'.
He has performed with Diana Krall, Jimmy Webb, Andrea Bocelli, and Joe Sample.
Nathan Peck
Nathan Peck, Bassist, was born in Ohio, 1977 and came from a family of musicians. He began playing professionally with them at age 15. Originally starting on piano at age 9, he also played clarinet, baritone saxophone, and drums before becoming a bassist in 1991.
At age 16 he won the Milt Hinton Award, a Scholarship for Students of the Double Bass and also won an honorable mention from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Peck was honored to perform at the International Duke Ellington Conference which was held in Pittburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 1995.
Currently based in Queens, New York, he is a fulltime musician and leads his own band, The Spankray Funk Band.
He has performed in NYC at the Blue Note, Knitting Factory, Smoke, Iridium, The Zinc Bar, Cleopatra's Needle, 55 Bar, Lenox Lounge, Deer Head Inn, Joes Pub, Barbes, Kenny's Castaways, Arthurs Tavern, Village Underground and others.
Mazz Swift
A native New Yorker, Swift began playing the violin at age 7. She graduated from the High School of the Performing Arts, during which time she made her solo public performance debut on the stage of New York's Alice Tully Hall, performing alongside members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. She later attended The Juilliard School of Music, but left in the middle of her 3rd year in order to pursue a more organic approach to music making.
Swift's diverse musical interests have led her in many directions; from classical music to rock to traditional folk music from around the world (specializing in Irish music) and most recently to hip hop.
Consequently, she has recorded and performed with a wide variety of artists including Perry Farrell, Moby, Vernon Reid and DJ Logic (The Yohimbe Brothers), Burnt Sugar and many artists from the Black Rock Coalition, Suphala, Kanye West, Common and Jay-Z.
(born May 24, 1941, Duluth, Minn., U.S.) U.S. singer and songwriter. He grew up in the iron-range town of Hibbing, Minn., adopted the name of the poet Dylan Thomas, and traveled to New York in search of idol Woody Guthrie. In the early 1960s he performed professionally in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and released albums that made him the darling of critics and folk music devotees. “Blowin' in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin'” became anthems of the civil rights movement. In 1965 he adopted electrically amplified instruments and the rhythms of rock and roll in a major departure. The landmark albums Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) established him as a leading figure in rock music, and his lyrics, influenced partly by the Beat movement, brought poetic complexity to pop music. After a motorcycle accident in 1966, he underwent another musical turnabout and released several albums (notably Nashville Skyline, 1969) characterized by country music elements and a muted, reflective tone. Among the most praised of his many later albums are Blood on the Tracks (1975), Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love and Theft (2001). He is perhaps the most admired and influential American songwriter of his time.
TRANSCRIPT OF BOB DYLAN'S REMARKS
AT THE BILL OF RIGHTS DINNER
Because you people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax. (Laughter) It is not an old peoples' world. It is not an old peoples' world. It has nothing to do with old people. Old people when their hair grows out, they should go out. (Laughter) And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules - and they haven't got any hair on their head - I get very uptight about it. (Laughter)
At times the performances are reminiscent of a Hoffnug Festival.
But overall one would have to ask, "who died?" because it seems like someone is decomposing perfectly good songs. Not a good way to encourage young people to listen to music.
I'm sorry if this seems to be unkind criticism, but then again I found the performances disagreeable if not down right offensive.
John, your interpretation of "Hey Mr. Tambourine Man" lyrics into music demonstrates either a complete insensitivity to the feeling of the poetry; or you purposefully tried to inject the opposite feeling.
You turned 'Blowin' in the Wind' into some pseudo-'Porgy&Bess' styled melody & rhythm - not too bad
I guess, at least it indicates you have some sensitivity to the feeling for the poetry. A similar comment applies to "Chimes of Freedom" and "Forever Young".
Overall, I give you a "T" for tedious. Given the post-modern / deconstructionist aesthetic prevalent in the pseudo-intellectual "art" world today, you probably consider that a complement.
I enjoyed the Mr. Tambourine Man. It was as if it was arranged by the late Frank Zappa. I too would have liked to hear the songs performed by other genres.
Interesting, though there is some loss here and some gain...I'll continue to listen to the original with this new experience somewhere in my mind, I'm sure.
Seriously, why didn't you get some other artist to do the first performance. You could have grabbed from the hip-hop, trance, techno, death-metal, or any other genre. The listener would have recieved the same experience - the "feeling" that someone has defecated on the music they love. To be positive; John didn't go the Rolling Stones style symphony orchestra route; but his composition was painful.
Dylan is music for the masses. How does that performance bring music to masses?
Why didn't they grab some people from other cultures to do this. I bet they would have actually heard a Dylan tune in their lifetime and actually do a better job interpreting it their own way.
The final performance by Howard Fishmann was good.
member. 
