‘It set me off’: the jazz song Bob Dylan credits with starting everything
If you were to play word association with Bob Dylan, the first genre of music that would come up would no doubt be folk.
The musical icon is a folk legend through and through. While his career might be filled with a range of different approaches to the genre (who could forget his controversial switch to folk rock), that does remain the style of music which he continually champions. With a unique voice, experimental vocal timing, some of the greatest lyrics ever written and a simplistic approach to chord structure, Bob Dylan is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest folk artists of all time.
And yet, his influence doesn’t exist solely within the world of folk. The work of Bob Dylan has been such an inspiration for creatives that you can hear it in rock, read it in literature, and ride the waves of it in a lot of jazz.
Plenty of jazz musicians have covered Bob Dylan songs, as the link between his music and that of jazz was apparently clear from very early on. In 1963, Bud Shank released the album Folk & Flute, which had three songs that the jazz artist dedicated to Dylan. Additionally, jazz aficionado Gerry Mulligan also recorded a twisted version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, which was piano-heavy and a big part of his record If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em.
It seems that the jazz influence rubbed off on Dylan, as he went on to write songs that may not have belonged entirely to the genre, but certainly used the timing and structure of jazz songs to their benefit. You can hear it in tracks such as ‘If Dogs Run Free’, which Dylan put on his New Morning record and is undoubtedly inspired by jazz.
That being said, perhaps it can be best heard in Dylan’s live shows, which might not incorporate jazz specifically, but do use the genre in terms of relying heavily on improvisation and having a free-flowing nature – early in his career, Bob Dylan was always pretty happy to just play song after song, reel out the hits and give the audience what they wanted, and shortly after that, he swapped out his acoustic guitar for an electric one, but he was still playing what were undeniably his songs. Things are a bit different in the modern age, though.
Bob Dylan’s approach to live performance altered, as he put less weight on playing the songs as they were supposed to be played, and instead used them as a loose template which he could follow from as close or as far as his heart desired. This upset a lot of fans who just wanted to hear ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in its entirety, but other music lovers fell in love with this new, borderline improvisational style of playing. It certainly relied on jazz somewhat, as it provided room for shows to change shape on a night-by-night basis, with some songs barely reflecting the studio recordings at times.
“In this particular case, he had his back to one half of the audience and was playing the organ, beautifully, I might say, and just running through the songs,” said Leonard Cohen while talking about seeing Bob Dylan live. “Some were hard to recognise. But nobody cared. That’s not what they were there for, and not what I was there for.”
It perhaps then won’t come as a surprise when you consider all of the above that some of Bob Dylan’s earliest inspirations were jazz artists. While he became a famous folk musician, it was a spark triggered by jazz music that originally got him excited about the prospect of making music. Specifically, it was a track by Thelonius Monk that really got things going.
“Has any of it inspired me as a songwriter?”, he said, concluding, “Yeah, ‘Ruby, My Dear’ by Monk. That song set me off in some direction to do something along those lines. I remember listening to that over and over.”
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