Singer and keyboardist Ben Sidran has divided most of his working life between gigs as a musician cum TV presenter, and stints in academia. He holds degrees from British and American universities, but says 'I really went to the University of Mose Allison and Bob Dylan'.
Sidran, who played in Hong Kong at the old Jazz Club in the late 1990s, paid tribute to Allison in Tell Me Something, a 1996 collection of the Sage of Tippo's songs on Verve, for which he shared vocal duties with Van Morrison, Georgie Fame and Allison himself. Now he has paid Dylan the same compliment.
'It's not possible to understand how important Bob Dylan was to us in the years between 1961 and 1967 if you weren't there,' Sidran says.
'He came out of nowhere, spoke in a real voice about magical things; the fact that he said it and did it made it OK for the rest of us to try to do it. He was single-handedly responsible for thousands of people starting to write songs, which, if you added up all the people who were influenced by all those people, you would have to say Bob Dylan today is like a virus that exists everywhere in popular music.'
Dylan Different acknowledges Sidran's debt with a selection of his personal favourites: about half are taken from Dylan's 60s heyday and the rest from later albums stretching up to 1989's Oh Mercy, the source of the opening track, a swampy Everything is Broken.
Surprisingly, given Sidran's blues and jazz background, few of the considerable number of songs Dylan has written in a straight-ahead 12-bar blues format are represented here, although we do get a shuffle reading of Highway 61.
The album does have a bluesy feel, created in part by prominent use of Rodolph Berger's slide guitar. Other musicians include Sidran's multi-instrumentalist son Leo, saxophonist Bob Malach, horn player Michael Leonhart and bassist Marcello Giuliani.