Jazz singer Paula West (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s concert)
The Swedish Academy got it right. Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” That phrase prioritizes Dylan and a poet, rather than a singer or a composer. The fact that he expressed his poetry through songs, rather than through slim printed volumes that few will ever read, simply meant that he was exceedingly successful at getting people to pay attention to his words. These days, any poet who can succeed in that achievement deserves all the awards he can get!
Nevertheless, it is important that Dylan was a poet fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” almost seems like his personal reflection on his own good fortune. However, those times had been changing long before Columbia released its third Dylan album under that name. It was in the second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, that Dylan directed his words at the many social ills that were dividing the generations against each other. Ten of the thirteen tracks are Dylan originals, beginning with “Blowin’ in the Wind” and progressing through “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Whether the music came from his own guitar or from the different bands for which he would prepare arrangements, the words were always at the heart of what made Dylan be Dylan.
Last night at Herbst Theatre, for the second of the four concerts in the 2019 PIVOT Series, San Francisco Performances presented jazz vocalist Paul West accompanied by the Adam Shulman Quartet. Leading from the piano, Shulman was joined by a rhythm section consisting of Owen Clapp on bass, Scott Sorkin on guitar, and Jon Arkin on drums. The title of the program was The Bob Dylan Songbook.
Given the context of those first two paragraphs, this was clearly an evening when words mattered. It is thus necessary to begin by observing that West was clearly conscious of the need for first-rate diction over the course of her 90-minute offering. Indeed, when one takes into account Dylan’s own style of delivery, which almost seemed calculated to provoke any expectations a listener may have had about singing, West was probably far more conscientious about diction than Dylan ever was. The result was an evening that was not so much about Dylan’s music and performance practices as it was a way to honor his words in a jazz setting of Shulman’s arrangements, which would follow or reject Dylan’s musical practices as seemed most appropriate.
In that setting West also took the liberty of singing three songs whose words were not by Dylan but whose semantics fit into the overall flow of the Dylan lyrics she had selected. “Gimme Some Truth” was included in the lineup almost in a way to suggest that John Lennon had finally figured out a way to respond to “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Then, in a gesture of irony that probably would have amused Lennon, West shifted immediately to “Put on a Happy Face,” one of the songs that Charles Strouse composed for Bye Bye Birdie. On the other hand “Subterranean” was followed by Randy Newman’s “Short People,” which then moved on to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
When American youth first became aware of Bob Dylan, it would be fair to say that they embraced his poems as a means of pushing back against what sociologist C. Wright Mills had describe as “the power elite.” Dylan’s early albums came out at a time when youth galvanized to rise up to challenge that “power elite,” whether it involved protest against the Vietnam War or the positive affirmation of the values and objectives of Martin Luther King. Last night West selected many Dylan texts that reminded us that there is now a new “power elite” that needs to be challenged. West not only delivered “the word of Dylan” but also added a few observations, along with an amusing … and not offensive … gesture of her own in reaction to those who delight in supporting “MAGA” baseball caps.
We need Dylan’s poetry now as much as we needed it to stand up to the “Masters of War” in the Sixties.
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