The small stage was crammed at the end as more musicians joined in!
★★★★★There are probably few songwriters whose work has been rearranged, reinterpreted and generally pulled apart quite as often as Bob Dylan’s. That presents anyone attempting another Dylan show with an obvious problem. Simply reproducing the records isn’t particularly interesting, while radically rearranging the songs risks losing what made them work in the first place.
Bob Dylan On Piano finds an attractive way through that problem. Taking familiar Dylan material and filtering it through a jazz-influenced piano style gives songs we may have heard hundreds of times a different texture without treating the originals with undue reverence.
That is important. Dylan himself was never particularly respectful of his own arrangements. Many who have seen him live report the experience of spending the opening bars of a song wondering what on earth it is, only for a familiar lyric suddenly to reveal its identity. His songs have always been things to be worked on rather than museum pieces to be preserved behind glass.
That spirit is very much present here.
The selection ranges across some of the best-known material, including “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and the unavoidable “Blowin’ in the Wind”, but the pleasure lies less in ticking off the hits than in hearing what happens when the songs are moved into a different musical setting. Piano changes their character. Add elements of jazz — changes of rhythm, phrasing and room for improvisation — and songs rooted in the folk tradition begin to reveal other possibilities.
One moment particularly caught my attention: “With God on Our Side”. I recognised something familiar in the melody which sent me off afterwards on one of those musical historical trails that are almost as enjoyable as the performance itself.
There is quite a story behind it.
Dylan’s melody is very close to that used by Irish writer Dominic Behan for “The Patriot Game”, a song about Fergal O’Hanlon, the young IRA volunteer killed during an attack on Brookeborough RUC barracks in County Fermanagh on New Year’s Day 1957. Behan, in turn, had used an older traditional melody generally traced to “The Merry Month of May”, also known in variants as “One Morning in May”.
Dylan wasn’t entirely coy about the connection either. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, he acknowledged that hearing Liam Clancy sing “The Patriot Game” had inspired “With God on Our Side”. Behan was considerably less relaxed about the borrowing and publicly criticised Dylan over it.
It’s a fascinating example of how songs travel. A traditional melody becomes an Irish political ballad; Dylan hears that ballad and reshapes it into an American anti-war song; decades later the song turns up at the Edinburgh Fringe transformed once again through jazz piano.
In a way, that accidental history lesson sums up why
Bob Dylan On Piano works. Dylan himself borrowed constantly from the musical traditions around him. Folk music, blues, gospel, country and old ballads all went into the mixture. Taking his songs and allowing jazz to have a conversation with them therefore feels less like tampering with Dylan than continuing the process from which much of his music emerged.
The show doesn’t need to lecture us about any of this. Indeed, the connection with “The Patriot Game” wasn’t explained during the performance. I enjoyed discovering it for myself afterwards, after recognising the tune. A good show can sometimes send you away wanting to know more, and this one did.
There is also a pleasing looseness to proceedings. This isn’t Dylan embalmed as a Nobel Prize-winning cultural monument. The songs are allowed to breathe, shift and occasionally surprise us. Familiar lyrics arrive from unfamiliar musical directions.
And then came a bonus.
The appearance of the Tenement Jazz Band for the finale lifted the performance into something more spontaneous. Their contribution brought another layer of energy to proceedings, and the improvised quality of the closing section suited the whole idea beautifully. What could have been simply a recital became, for a while, a musical encounter.
That distinction matters. There are plenty of tribute shows at the Fringe and elsewhere, and many of them are very good at recreating a particular sound. Bob Dylan On Piano is doing something different. It isn’t asking, “How accurately can we reproduce Bob Dylan?” It is asking what else can be found inside these songs.
For Dylan enthusiasts, there is the pleasure of recognition coupled with the occasional jolt of hearing something familiar take an unexpected turn. For jazz listeners, there is the enjoyment of musicians taking well-established material and finding space within it to play. And for those of us interested in the strange routes by which songs and melodies travel across countries, generations and political movements, “With God on Our Side” provides an intriguing little rabbit hole to disappear down afterwards.
Dylan’s songs have survived because they can take this sort of treatment. They don’t have to remain fixed to the arrangements in which we first encountered them.
Bob Dylan on Piano understands that. It respects Dylan not by preserving his music unchanged, but by doing what Dylan has spent much of his career doing himself: taking songs apart, putting them back together and seeing what happens.
The result is affectionate, inventive and, with the Tenement Jazz Band joining the fun at the end, satisfyingly unpredictable. Dylan fans should find plenty to enjoy here, but you certainly don’t need to be a Dylan obsessive to appreciate it. An interest in jazz, songwriting and the sheer pleasure of musicians discovering new possibilities in old songs will do just as well.
Reviewed by Pat Harrington
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