GATHER 'ROUND PEOPLE

Songs of Dylan

Steve Alves sings Dylan's songs. Kenny Butler plays guitar. Together they bring the words, melodies, rhythm, and strange musical life of this work on to the stage with focused attention, joy, and no imitation act.

THE SHOW

Incredible songs — like nothing else.

A live two-person presentation of Bob Dylan's songs. Steve and Kenny bring Dylan's songs to the stage, the ones that have been rattling around inside their heads for a lifetime.

Love songs, hard songs, songs of departure, warning, humor, desire, accusation, memory, prophecy, loneliness, and sudden light. Steve and Kenny have listened to Dylan across decades, album after album, song after song, and they keep finding more in it. The material is not a monument. It is living music and stories.

The aim is not to impersonate Dylan, not to freeze the records in place, and not to put on an act about the 1960s. The aim is to bring the songs onto a stage where an audience can hear what is in them, the language, the pulse, the shape of the melodies, the unexpected turns, the stories, and to level up the guitar playing to inspire the singer and delight the listener.

"Simple Twist of Fate" — Steve Alves, voice. Kenny Butler, guitar.

WATCH

Words out front, guitar underneath.

Dylan created songs that, at first, sound simple because the surface does often seem simple: a few chords, a direct melody, a familiar form. But the music is full of ideas and character. Each song is some sort of story that we recognize as something that lives inside us. The vocal phrases may enter late, early, or sideways. A melody can be plainspoken and then suddenly, in an unexpected syncopation, land in a place that sparks the next idea.

"Songs of Dylan" does not reduce that to a singer with a guitar strumming behind him. The guitar gives each song its ground, bass, rhythm, harmony, inner movement, tension, release, color, and life. It can become its own little band, providing shelter for the singer rather than competing with him. That little six-string band is there for the singer to surf on the musical waves.

STEVE ALVES VOICE

The singer.

Steve Alves is a songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and documentary filmmaker with a lifetime around American music and storytelling. In this show, he sings. He delivers Dylan's words, the stories, scenes, characters, jokes, heartbreak, terror, tenderness, and rhythm of the language.

Dylan's music entered Steve's life early and hit him hard. As a young man, Dylan made him want to play guitar. The voice and the writing seeped so far into his life that he eventually stopped singing the songs, to step out from under the influence. Kenny's idea was to turn that distance around and embrace it. Not to copy Dylan, but to have Steve embrace the enormous knowledge and feeling he has for the work and sing it with total freedom.

KENNY BUTLER GUITAR

The musical world.

Kenny Butler is a composer and improviser with a working life across Delta blues, Mississippi hill-country blues, fingerstyle guitar, jazz, Irish music, classical orchestra work, and Shakespeare performance. The point is not the resume. It is why the accompaniment has shape, force, motion, and its own voice.

His fingerstyle approach carries bass, pulse, chords, fills, counter-melody, and rhythmic character. It makes the guitar a compact ensemble with its own rhythm, emotion, and virtuosity that supports the song.

Sworn to the word of bebop, witness to the blues, and a Shakespearean radical on six strings, fingerpicking life into the songs of Dylan.

THE WORKING DYNAMIC

The voice carries the story. The guitar creates the world the story moves through.

Steve doesn't just stand in front of an accompanist. Kenny doesn't just decorate the singer. They listen and inspire each other in real time.

The arrangements are built song by song. The question is never, "What can we add?" It's, "What is this song asking for?" Sometimes that is a hard rhythmic pulse. Sometimes a thumping bass line. Kenny will often play most of a particular song exactly as Dylan did but then integrate beautiful fingerstyle playing with the intrinsic rhythm.

The set can move from quiet to driving and back again but the joy is in the playing. The show welcomes people who love Dylan and people who have not yet been brought into the work. Kenny and Steve love to play!

THE SONGS

Current base repertoire.

A living list. Sets are built for the room, so not every song is performed at every event.

WHERE IT FITS

Any room where an audience can listen.

BOOK THE SHOW

Bring the songs into your room.

An intimate, high-level two-person concert built for people who care about Dylan's writing, and for people who simply want to hear great songs played live.

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