Late on Friday night, on the more intimate Charlie Gillett Stage, there was an unusual cross-cultural treat: Ballake Sissoko is one of Mali’s most accomplished kora players, not as well known as his Bamako next-door neighbour Toumani Diabate and more firmly rooted in Manding musical tradition, but undoubtedly in the same class. Vincent Ségal is a brilliant French cellist who moves with consummate ease from the classical repertoire to free jazz. They are both technical virtuosi but neither of them plays to the gallery.

In a manner consonant with some of the most deeply held tenets of West African musical ethics, the two musicians shone brightly without outshining each other. The material is mostly drawn from Malian tradition, and Ségal, who has spent months living in Ballake’s family compound, has absorbed more than the sophisticated architecture of the kora literature. He understands deeply the values of modesty and cool: a kind of heartfelt minimalism that allows music to do more with less, and understate expression while maximizing emotional content.

The delicate ripples of Sissoko’s playing elicited washes of cello-colour, both plucked and bowed, from Ségal, in a dialogue of great refinement. There was call and response as well as the magical combination of two distinct voices from vastly different backgrounds, a mix enabled by the duo’s willingness to listen to each other. Ségal is familiar with the lyra players of Crete and the kemenche players of Iran and Turkey, and with the deft use of harmonics and a subtle command of microtonal slides, he extended the music’s field in a thoroughly beguiling manner. At times, his cello sounded like a Wassoulou soku, the one-stringed fiddle that conjurs the spirits of the bush, and at others like an Appalachian fiddler, delivering short rhythmic bow-strokes, with Sissoko’s kora, reminiscent of the banjo, an instrument whose origins lie in Africa. They claim the kora attracts the djinn, and it is said that it shouldn’t be played late at night, with the front-door open. With Ségal beside him, Sissoko was undoubtedly weaving magic, but of a wholly beneficent kind, holding the audience in a very rare spell.

Later in the festival, Aziz Sahmaoui and his University of Gnawa, was also in the business of contacting the spirit world, but in a much more extrovert way. Formerly with the Orchestre National de Barbès, the Paris-based collective who featured a number of different North African genres from Chaabi to Rai, Sahmaoui, in an imaginative reconstruction, focuses on the music of the Gnawa, the itinerant Maghreb musical sorcerers, who perform very powerful healing ceremonies that often take on the form of collective psychodrama, as well as spiritual house-cleaning that puts Feng Shui in the shade. The rhythm of Gnawa music is quite literally infectious – it is designed to take you out of your mind. The trance is activated by the repetition of magical incantations, the ear-splitting clatter of the kerkaba, large metal castanets, and above all the eerie sound of the gunbri, a gut-stringed sacred instrument associated with the sect. Sahmaoui played the lute as well, as the ngoni, a sub-Saharan cousin of the gunbri. With several African musicians in the band, Sahmaoui is taking Gnawa music back to its roots in Guinea or Ghana – the etymology of “Gnawa’ is clear about that – and the sect’s families are descended from West African slaves. The musicianship was spare, tight and ruthlessly effective. There was an almost scientific use of rhythmic breaks in the backing vocals, a characteristic splitting of the beat that feels as if designed to mess with the listeners’ minds and blow open the way for heightened awareness. In Gnawa ceremonies, the adepts are moved to dance their troubles away as they whirl to the rising power of the music. At WOMAD, the audience responded in similar though untutored fashion, transported, albeit for a few minutes, to another realm.

“Set the Piano Stool on Fire” was recently shown on ARTE France and Germany and also in Switzerland and Austria. The DVD of the film was released by Artificial Eye earlier in the summer. Further TV sales are expected in the next few months. The DVD rights for the rest of the world are available.

Press links:
Alan Rusbridger on Alfred and Kit (The Guardian)
Michael Church on the film (The Independent)
Mark Kidel on the making of the film (The Arts Desk)

DVD
To buy “Set the Piano Stool on Fire”

All aboard! 4000 visitors a day are queuing up for a voyage in the belly of a whale. Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan, a commission for the Monumenta series at the Paris Grand Palais, is a runaway success, one of those Zeitgeist-attuned mega-installations that double up as fairground attraction and religious experience. The crowd walks straight into the giant inflatable from the entrance, each person admitted to the inner sanctum, one-by-one, through an air-locked revolving door. The rosy light and foggy atmosphere have an otherworldly quality. The punters are awestruck. Even the camera-phone addicts, texting images to friends, seem to be subdued. “It’s like arriving on a different planet” someone whispers. A man in a suit wanders around bemused, trailing his carry-on luggage as if he had boarded the wrong spaceship. The womb-like effect of Leviathan is intense, at once claustrophobic and comforting.

The space inside Kapoor’s mammoth belly is reminiscent of a cathedral: the vision embodied in the work and the technological prowess displayed in its massive scale and elegant forms is almost super-human. Cathedral-builders displayed something close to hubris – those towers and spires reached for something beyond the ordinary. Leviathan displays the same heroic daring and the star-cult the French have loaded on the artist – they have used his face to advertise the piece – is in many ways appropriate.

But there is more to Leviathan than ego and megalomania. The design is brilliant in conception and exquisite in realisation. In a body of work that has often explored the darker sides of Eros, Kapoor has so far only alluded to the secret places that dwell beyond enticing orifices. In Paris, we get full penetration and the experience doesn’t disappoint. Once inside the womb, though, the rosy colour and the architecture of the space suggest the chambers of the heart as much as other hidden parts of the body. What is clear is that we are inside something and the feeling of being enclosed is curiously palpable.

After the first impact – the sublime as wow-factor – the subtleties of the piece become gradually apparent. As the light outside the building changes, the atmosphere within Leviathan shifts. Kapoor has exploited the delicate tracery of the Grand Palais’ steel beams, pillars and girders with imagination. As the sun comes out, the rich pattern of shadows in projected onto the walls of the inflatable and depending on the intensity of the sunshine, the light-show is dramatically hard-edged or gently soft-focus. When clouds drift by, the walls close in and the place becomes more tangibly womb-like. The interplay between these states plays on both intellect and emotions. The central chamber branches out in three directions: the one that faces you as you go in, a kind of tantric altar, presents a mesmerising vanishing point, a dark circle at the meeting point of more than a dozen seams in Leviathan’s synthetic membrane. The side chambers have a different feel as they drop away from a soft rounded rim into an invisible space which the visitor can only imagine. As in other pieces, Kapoor plays with our desire for the hidden and the impact such absent spaces have on our experience of presence.

The play between inner and outer is most awe-inspiring when emerging from the belly of the whale to the exterior of the structure, which has been skilfully hidden from view as visitors are initially funnelled in through the airlock from the street. There is a sense of relief as well as surprise, and a simple pleasure in knowing how the thing works, a hit of concrete reality which makes the remembered magic of the inner sanctum all the more inspiring. Not that the black inflatable isn’t awe-inspiring as it fills the vastness of the Grand Palais space, but the heart of the Leviathan experience lies in an original variation on the theme of birth suggested by the passage from the soft darkness of the womb to the near-blinding light outside . This is where the artist touches on the world of dreams and provides, as he has done in his best work, a moment of perception-bending transformation. This more than just clever illusionism – though this is part of the entertainment and it draws the crowds – but a kind of revelation that can be experienced in the body as well as the mind and the emotions.

Paris’s love affair with megalomania, from the phallic dare of the Eiffel Tower to Mitterrand’s self-promoting “grand projets”, may sometimes seem a little grandiose, but there is no doubt that these gestures sometimes pay off, not just in terms of bringing tourists to the French capital. All the Monumenta projects so far have been remarkable and the vast space of the Grand Palais has inspired Richard Serra, Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski to create massive installations that have given their work a setting which has magnified its power. For Kapoor as well, the Grand Palais has worked a magic that was not present in his Turbine Hall commission Marysas or the disappointingly bitty show at the Royal Academy last year.

First published in The Arts Desk 6 November 2010

Terry Riley is one of the great unsung heroes of contemporary music, the Ur-minimalist who shaped the creative paths of John Adams, Peter Townshend, Mike Oldfield, and Philip Glass to name just a sample of the wide range of musicians who have been inspired by his raga-tinged loops and all-enveloping electronic soundscapes. Bristol has just hosted a series of exciting concerts celebrating the 75 year-old Californian composer.  Riley’s groundbreaking genius feels as fresh today as it first sounded in the 1960’s.

Back in the early 1950’s, Terry Riley was one of the first composers to experiment with tape loops: in the pre-digital era pieces of magnetic tape were dexterously joined in a looped form that could be played continuously. The idea of using repetition in music, associated as it is with modal harmonies and drones, could be seen as the musical expression of a desire to escape from the tyranny of resolution-driven narrative. Terry Riley’s music goes nowhere out of choice and draws the audience beyond boredom into an awakened apprehension of the here and now. This is the soundtrack for the years in which people first imagined the end of history. Riley both reflects the cultural currents of his time and has played a part in shaping them.

The first Bristol concert, at St George’s, featured the master himself, accompanied by saxophonist George Brooks and and Talvin Singh on tabla and percussion. This was, paradoxically, the least captivating of the evenings, perhaps because Riley chose to make it a homage to his teacher Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian singer who taught Jon Hassell, La Monte Young and US avant-gardists of the 1960’s. Indian vocal forms the core of a rich and profound musical tradition, and Riley’s singing in Bristol was little more than a touching and respectful attempt at impersonating a practice that, when done by the masters of the genre, is one of the most powerful and sophisticated expressions of the human spirit. The American, looking like a hippie sage, sat benignly at the keyboards, and even played a few jazz standards with some feeling. There were moments of magic when the sounds from the three musicians blended in a modal mix, producing a series of wave-like surges, but the event as a whole was disappointing.

Terry Riley should have returned to Bristol for the next concert, a stunning rendition of his masterpiece “In C”, played by a 20-guitar orchestra led by Portishead’s Adrian Utley who was joined by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, Graham Fitkin and Charles Hazlewood on an assortment of keyboards including an ear-tingling Farfisa organ and the honeyed tones of a Hammond B. The piece consists of a series of 53 separate modal fragments, all in the key of C,  played not always in strictly order and only sometimes in unison by the assembled musicians. The regular pulse which sounds almost ritualistically through the piece was held by percussionist Tony Orrell, a man better known for his inventive free jazz drumming. The ensemble was completed by the delicate and contrasting textures of Ruth Wall’s harp. This was not the first guitar orchestra adventure for Adrian Utley, who is probably Britain’s most versatile and creative electric guitar player – in terms of the range of moods and timbres he can produce. Last year he created a 100-guitar piece for the re-opening of Bristol’s Colston Hall, a site-specific piece with musicians strategically placed to produce a kind of musical architecture. A few months later, in collaboration with Will Gregory, he created a brilliantly-conceived new soundtrack for Carl Dreyer’s silent classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc, this time with 8 guitars, a small choir, keyboards, percussion and  harp.

While the music for Dreyer’s film was undeniably a major and original piece, the performance of “In C” was something else. Within the warm embrace and uniquely vivid acoustic of Bristol’s St George’s, Adrian Utley’s ensemble, who played without a PA, gave Riley’s classic remarkable presence. The piece requires from each and every musician, a deft and mixture of discipline and instinct, close reading of the simple score and individual improvisation. The assembled musicians felt their ways forward, at first tentatively, only slowly winning the audience’s engagement and battling against an annoying buzz from one of the amps, but thirty or so minutes into the piece, they found a groove, and the audience followed, having no doubt unconsciously, as Riley intended, internalised the piece’s many-layered and shifting patterns of sound. On paper, this is piece that threatens chaos, but the absence of soloists or stars seems to bring out the cooperative spirit that anarchists believe natural to humanity.

From that point on, the event took on an other-worldly quality, the relentless repetition no longer binding the audience to feelings of bemusement or boredom, but facilitating a kind of liberation. I spoke to several people afterwards and they all felt the same sense of near-ecstatic release, as if something inside them had been turned on, that made them feel an extraordinary sense of well-being. “In C” is skilfully constructed – perhaps according to what Sufi musicians would call “soul science”, techniques for inducing trance.  The piece starts simply, moves into more intricate and inter-laced patterns and finally reaches a series of emotional climaxes. The orchestra rode the successive waves of climactic energy as if they were one – even though without a conductor (Charles Hazlewood was only playing the organ), collectively sensing the diminuendos and crescendos with uncanny sensitivity.

The following night some of the same musicians re-assembled at the Bristol Old Vic, to perform improvisations based on Terry Riley’s later and better-known master-piece, “Rainbow in Curved Air”. The concert was part of “Bristol Jam”, BOV artistic director Tom Morris’s  unique and imaginative celebration of impro.   The stage of the atmospheric 18^th century theatre was bathed in dramatic light and dry ice as Charles Hazlewood gave a pithy and articulate introduction to Riley and minimalism. We were, he said, to have a “psychedelic experience”. Much as with St George’s, a beautiful (and architecturally minimalist) converted church building, the Bristol Old Vic provides the perfect vessel for a musical journey in which intimacy allows for the mind to wander and open up to Riley’s meditative music.

The first half of the show was devoted to “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band”, one of the two compositions from “Rainbow in Curved Air” the album that was so popular and influential when it came out at the end of the 60’s. A trio of saxophones – Andy Sheppard  (tenor and soprano), Jason Yarde (alto) and Will Gregory (baritone) – formed a chorus of understated sounds that ran from breathy whisper to mournful screech. Adrian Utley slowly drew a bow across his electric guitar transcending the instrument’s sonic clichés, while Graham Fitkin produced otherworldy textures from his keyboards and synths.

After the interval, they launched into Riley’s iconic “Rainbow” piece, a modal adventure in 7/8, whose introduction inspired the opening of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and Pete Townshend’ “Baba O’Riley”, the guitarist’s homage to the American minimalist and his own spiritual teacher Meher Baba.

If Poppy Nogood had led us into a wondrous world of moods and textures, stilling that part of the mind that is programmed to expect narrative (or “teleological” as Hazlewood put it) music, the final piece enabled the musicians to let rip and freely explore the possibilities of the piece’s modal structure.  They were visibly having a great time, playing with sound as if for the first time: Ruth Wall plucking the extremities of her harp strings to produce tiny insect-like phrases, Tom Jenkinson (aka “Squarepusher”) slapping his bass with a mixture of razor-sharp funk and wild abandon, often in perfect harmony with Tony Orrell’s discrete but potent drumming, the sax-players Sheppard and Yarde alternating sensitive washes of reedy colour with sheets of sound reminiscent of John Coltrane, and Hazlewood, Gregory and Fitkin – at various keyboards – providing a thrilling range of rhythmic runs, bass-heavy chords and mesmeric drones. Although this was nominally “The Charles Hazlewood Allstars”, this was music made by stars  – but without the intrusion of competing egos. There is something about drone-based modal music that transcends the strictly personal, favouring instead the pull of the collective and the sheer thrill of creative collaboration. That Terry Riley’s music should have inspired such genre-free improvisational exploration says a great deal about the lasting importance of his music.

Bellowhead are 21^st century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a Zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sound gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go along a new folk music for our times.

British folk has two distinct but inter-connected strands, reflecting perhaps the (oft-forgotten) fact that we are an island people: a rootsy and sometimes purist obsession with home-grown tunes and lyrics and a contrasting urge to work the past into a more contemporary mode, as well as absorb all manner of influences from across the seas. Our island folk music has a resolutely pagan side as well: a yearning for the everything-goes freedom of polytheism, and pleasures untainted by Protestant guilt.

Not surprising that Bellowhead’s most recent and much-acclaimed album should be called “Hedonism”. The current tour showcases material from the new CD, songs and instrumentals that dazzle with their stylistic range, without ever feeling excessively disparate. There is a distinct Bellowhead sound – call it ‘big band folk’ – with the varied tonal colours of reeds and brass used as texture and riff, and a pallet of moods that stretch from the melancholy and poetic to the roughness of superbly delivered ceilidh romps.

The difficult challenge of opening for Bellowhead on the first night of the tour was bravely taken up by Northerners Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell, daring, with almost painful innocence, to bare their souls in a string of melancholy songs delivered with astonishing vulnerability. Distant British cousins of Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver and Joanna Newsom, they stumbled over forgotten lyrics and bad tuning, and yet skillfully used their mistakes as further signs of authenticity. Their quiet and often beautiful musings, delivered with a minimum of histrionics, could not have provided a more fitting prelude to the fire and theatre of Bellowhead, whose opening song “Yarmouth Town” followed the duo’s super-gentle support set like a hurricane.

While Bellowhead’s ten musicians are all stars in their own right, each with several brief moments of musical glory, this is very much Jon Boden’s band. He comes from a tradition of charismatic British front-men that spans from music-hall to punk, a hard-working and thoroughly professional entertainer, whose every gesture enhances his vocals and fiddle-playing. In a series of songs that conjure up a world of heroes and heroines from the margins of society – whores, sailors, drunks and other transgressors – he incarnates the essence of underworld pleasure-seeking. There is a hymn to whisky and a song in which he celebrates the month of May – that pulsating moment of the year when everything is young and drawn to love and sex.  With Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam”, a gallic valse with touches of klezmer and jazz, he pulls in the audience, working up an emotional storm, rising a long way from the safety net of the British folk tradition.

The combination of funk and jig, English dance-music and African-inspired syncopation is blindingly obvious, and yet no band has done it quite like this before. Bellowhead’s music suggests, without a trace of academic pretension, that so much mainstream popular music of the last 50 years – from rock to funk – has encoded in its DNA elements of the British (and particularly Scots-Irish) folksong and dance tradition.  What Bellowhead does, they do with the instincts and technical skills of a group of incredibly savvy and creative musicians and, what’s more, they know in their bones that mojo-workin’ voodoo is not entirely unrelated to our own shape-shifting tradition of magical healing and sorcery.

The fiddlers are superlative, bowing away as if in a race with the devil, the horns flawlessly riffing in perfect unison. The trombonist wails away in a priest’s incongruous cassock: this is a band with little respect for established religion – or the rigorous forms of any other tradition. They evoke distant echoes colliery brass, overlaid with blasts of southern soul, the controlled anarchy of New Orleans and the fiery spirit of the Balkan Roma. John Spiers, the squeeze-box virtuoso, plays straight man to Jon Boden’s comic-book rascal hero, providing a subtle but ever-present ground to the band’s many-layered sound. Two of the violin players double on pipes and oboe, changing instruments as swiftly as sleight-of-hand artists, adding the rich textures that give Bellowhead their unique character.

Bellowhead are a character-driven band in every sense and this is ensemble work (as they say in the theatre) of the highest order. The unique atmosphere of Bristol’s Old Vic, originally a venue designed for music as well as drama, suits their antics very well.   The BOV’s artistic director Tom Morris, recognises the band’s theatrical potential and his assistant Simon Godwin has coached them a little, ahead of the current tour. Not that they need much performance enhancement, for this is has always been one of the most accomplished live acts in the country, not just within the world of ‘new folk’.

There are many exotic colours to Bellowhead’s brilliance, but they are also essentially English. The traditional song “Little Sally Racket” launches Jon Boden into a fast and furious punk-style rant, in a manner that recalls the best home-grown (and quintessentially British) bands of the late 70s, but the song then breaks into Young Tradition-style deep-folk a cappella.  At the very end of the show, they reclaim their roots in a series of rip-roaring dance tunes: the band’s front line fiddlers pogoing exuberantly one second, and skipping joyfully like seasoned clog-dancers the next. The audience are jumping up and down too: this has been an exceptional night and the band’s exuberance has swept any lingering signs of seasonally affected disorder well away.

Bob Dylan in America

The Bodley Head  £20.00

390pp

Published 7 September 2010

Review first published in The Arts Desk, 15 September 2010

Capturing a ‘shape-shifter’ – as the Irish musician Liam Clancy described Bob Dylan – is not a simple task, as the object of the hunt is by definition elusive. Sean Wilentz’s multi-dimensional series of essays on Bob Dylan chases its prey with a deftness and broad-ranging sweep that mirrors Zimmy’s mercurial nature without losing overall coherence. Dylanology is a discipline that has produced brilliant commentators, not least Greil Marcus, Michael Gray and Christopher Ricks, and historian Wilentz is a worthy addition to this learned and sometimes brilliantly inspired cohort.

In a book written with the clear advantage of creative hindsight afforded by  Dylan’s most recent work (the Theme Time Radio Hours, his memoir “Chronicles Vol 1” and the last four studio albums and re-issues), Wilentz has put together a number of previously published essays and new material in a form that explicitly avoids completeness. The approach is closer to Marcus’s attempt at placing Dylan deep in the context of the “weird old America’ than it is to the encyclopaedic ambition that has characterised Gray’s work.

“What does America tell us,” Wilentz asks, “about Bob Dylan – and what does Bob Dylan tell us about America?”  Dylan wrote in “Chronicles Vol 1” that “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected…the godawful truth of that would be the all encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”  “Bob Dylan in America” conjures in many different ways the chronic and recurring American conditions which mix tragedy and hope, darkness and light, seriousness and humour, and the ways in which a creative genius such as Dylan has provided a mirror to some of his nation’s essential character as well as transmute it through music and poetry.

Although Wilentz is an academic- and his profession sometimes makes for tortuous and over-argued advocacy of an interpretative line – this is a refreshingly personal and emotional book. Wilentz grew up in a world which nurtured Dylan’s development as an artist, the left-wing Bohemia of Greenwich Village, where the author’s parents ran a bookshop. He went to his first Dylan concert with his father in 1964. Wilentz’s recollections and his more recent involvement with the Dylan ‘industry’ as resident historian on the official web site give the book an engaging quality, as well as relief from the material that drifts into the (perhaps inevitable) realm of the Dylan anorak.

In Sean Wilentz’s search for the deep structure of the “jagged art of a mercurial artist”, a venture which takes him off to the edge of the beaten track and beyond, Wilentz writes for those who are prepared to see in Dylan a “paradoxical and unstable combination or tradition and defiance”.  For him, Bob Dylan’s years as a born-again Christian are neither betrayal nor surprise but fit into a larger – and characteristically American – picture. This fascinating and thought-provoking book will send the reader off to the recordings themselves, from the Minnesota Hotel bootlegs through to the recent (and to some shocking) Christmas album. And that is not all, as it had me dipping into re-issues of Charlie Poole,  Sacred Harp groups recorded in the 1930’s, Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton – and Frank Sinatra.  As Wilentz points out, Dylan’s radio shows (in which he played Sinatra most of all) have revealed a range of enthusiasms and influences that reaches far beyond blues and folk. As he points out, Dylan is not a baby boomer. Born in 1941, he grew up in the 1940’s and 50’s absorbing pre rock’n’roll range of musical and cultural riches that in turn reach back into the early 20^th century and beyond, as well as attitudes that might seem out of tune with the radicalism we associate with the 1960’s.

Wilentz writes very well about music: the chapter which tells the story of the recording of the classic double album “Blonde on Blonde”, based on new material from master-tapes and help from Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen, is a gripping blow-by blow account of the surprisingly creative encounter (given this is 1966) between ‘hip’ Jewish New York and ‘good ole boy’ Nashville. But he is above all a particularly intuitive historian, and this enables him to place Dylan – both broadly and deeply – in the context of American culture. Greil Marcus was the brilliant pioneer in this field and Wilentz is careful not to cover the same ground. Context here is not just a set of objective factors, but something alive, from which Dylan draws his inspiration and to which he has undeniably contributed.  Over the course of chapters which at first might seem a little disjointed, but which gradually reveal a pattern of underlying and inter-related themes, Dylan emerges as an artist who is almost uncannily connected to America’s cultural and political past. He borrows extensively from poetry, literature and music, touching a timeless quality that defines unique American myths and archetypes, which he then alchemically transforms into something that illuminates the present and the future.

The book draws together seemingly disparate material including the American Popular Front movement of the 1930’s, composer Aaron Copland, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Poets, the Sacred Harp shape-note singing tradition, Blind Willie McTell, American Civil War History, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe,  to evoke the world through which our shape-shifting hero has navigated. Without having to make definitive biographical statements, Wilentz paints a picture of a man tuned in, possessed and inspired, and who has always re-discovered himself after periods of creative depression through drawing once again from the extraordinary rich and contradictory source that is America. Dylan works, Wilentz writes, with “the dissolution of distinctions between past and present – as well as between high art and low, scholarly and popular, exotic and familiar”.

While the America in which Wilentz places Bob Dylan addresses the tangled relationship between African-American and white musical cultures, a creative dance of borrowings, influences and imitations, he remains trapped in a view of America blinkered by a benign form of ethnocentrism. The extent to which modern American music has been shaped by powerful aesthetics roots which have a source in African culture is incalculable – and often neglected by historians. If Dylan is, as Wilentz claims an artist who has “dug inside America as deeply as any artist ever has”, it is as if he has forgotten that so much American music  - including Dylan’s – draws inspiration and form from the drummers of Congo Square, the ethical admonitions of gospel and the raunchy sexuality of the Delta Blues.

The image of Dylan that emerges from the book is that of trickster and masked marauder. The trickster – related to the Greek God Hermes, the ultimate go-between, linguistic virtuoso and thief – stands forever at the crossroads, opportunistically alert to every possibility. And the mask – a feature of all things Dionysiac, from death-and-rebirth scenarios to the essence of theatre and tragedy – allows the one who wears it to hide, to change his or her appearance and ultimately to speak more openly. The evocative  portrait of Dylan on the book’s cover – by Eugene Smith – present’s Dylan as super-hip rocker (armed with a Fender guitar) plus a touch of the protest folkie (the harmonica on a rack).  The Ray-Bans provide the mask of ultimate coolness, and the joint on his lips a suggestion of the ecstasy and poetic vision offered by Dionysus.

Wilentz takes great pains to defend Dylan from the increasing accusations of plagiarism to which he has been subjected in recent years. There is course an element of ‘thievery’ in the lifting of lyrics from other people’s songs or poems, but Dylan clearly does it playfully – just as Hermes steals his older brother Apollo’s cattle as a dare and a jape. As Lewis Hyde has written in his masterly study of the trickster  (“Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art”), sleight of hand (and mind) are essential to real creativity, and Dylan displays most perfectly this deeply human characteristic.

Not surprisingly, the section on  “Love and Theft” (the title ‘stolen’ by Dylan from a study on 19^th century black-faced minstrelsy, another masked mode) is crucial to the main theme of Wilentz’s book, as well as a crowning achievement in the period of renewal which Dylan has experienced as a senior citizen. While Dylan the shape-shifter’s many masks may have been deliberately used as protection and provocation in his youth, he is now at ease with the playfulness of his theatricality, as well as the theatrical quality of his play. Dylan’s film “Masked and Anonymous” slated by most of critics, is, according to Wilentz, misunderstood: it is flawed but a contradictory and revealing piece of work, part of the kaleidoscopic and theatrical whole that Dylan unfolds, year after year, before our eyes.

There are times when Wilentz seems surprised at the many connections between Dylan and the lives and works of others whose paths he has crossed – from the leftist composer Aaron Copland to songster Blind Willie McTell: as if such synchronicities and parallels were not the reflection of a world that is both chaotic and meaningful, not least when they are refracted through the prismatic genius of an artist such as Dylan.  What has made Dylan so important over the years has been his deep attunement to the many streams of American culture and myth, an acute and wide-reaching sensitivity which is explored with real passion in Wilentz’s searching addition to the field of inspired Dylanology.