By Michael Ullman

Javon Jackson’s homage to Bob Dylan is well thought out and beautifully rendered.

Javon Jackson, Jackson Plays Dylan (Solid Jackson Records)

My memories of Bob Dylan begin with the first of several occasions I saw him live. I was still in high school when I started going to the Club 47 in Harvard Square. As I remember it, he walked in on someone else’s gig. (Joan Baez’s? I was friends with her sister, Mimi.) Later, in 1963, or soon after, at the height of the folk music “revival,” Dylan played a concert at a theater on Mass. Ave, opposite the Christian Science Church. He played the first half acoustically — doing everything he could to appear and sound bored. He had the most distinctive mumble in the business, but on that night, it wasn’t always clear exactly which song he was mumbling.

Then, after Dylan returned with his electric band, about a third of the audience demonstrated against the violation (via electricity) of the folk music ethos. They waited until he started to play, so that their walk-out would make the biggest impact. They left, thereby preserving their acoustic purity. (I experienced a similar protest action when Herbie Hancock first played fusion in New York: preferring their gossip to Hancock’s electric piano, a bunch of dismissive New York critics yammered all around me.)

The folkies staged an amusingly pyrrhic victory. Dylan’s music with the electric band was joyous—energized, even, by the dissent. He was into deeply into the performance, and his band was great. In hindsight, songs themselves that what made the show wondrous. Soon everyone recognized Blowin’ in the Wind, Like a Rolling Stone, It Ain’t Me, Babe, Mr. Tambourine Man, and others. Dylan was the master of protest songs — but also of eccentric love songs. Sometimes they were the same song. He made folk music what we then called “relevant.”

It’s that songwriter, with his distinctive tinge of romantic bitterness, to which tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson pays tribute on Jackson Plays Dylan. The session opens with Jackson’s one composition in the collection, “One for Bob Dylan.” It’s a strutting piece in 4/4 (mostly) with drummer Ryan Sands providing the backbeat. After fine solos by bassist Isaac Levien and pianist Jerry Menasia, the melody fades and comes back as “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In the middle of his solo on that classic, Menasia plays the theme in block chords: the band is respectful of Dylan’s compositions. The track fades out again with a marching backbeat.

Jackson employs fade-ins as well as fadeouts. His “The Times They Are A-Changin'” seems to sidle into being. Maybe the saxophonist would have preferred to play the set continuously, as a medley. After a hushed chorus, pianist Menasia punches out the melody. Jackson’s entrance is both forthright and, in terms of the melody, evasive. Not so his “Mr Tambourine Man” which rehearses the memorable tune almost as is. Jackson can’t get the trademark Dylan sneer into “Like a Rolling Stone,” but he makes it work as a jazz piece.

“Forever Young” is one of Dylan’s sweetest songs: the lyrics wish us well in a dozen ways. He wants us, for instance, “always to be courageous”while staying forever young. Jackson’s version features singer Nicole Zuraitis, who supplies just the right amount of warmth and clear articulation. She improvises in her second run through the lyrics before beating out the last chorus. The other vocal is by Lisa Rischer on what I consider to be one of the lesser known Dylan songs here, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Rischer sings as if she is pressing against the mike….at times she growls, or sighs in a manner that is somehow threatening. Dylan had his self-righteous side — (who’s at fault in “It Ain’t Me, Babe”?). “Gotta Serve Somebody” threatens all the bad guys of the ’60s. Jackson has bassist Levien introduce “Lay, Lady Lay” before taking over the track with his serious, nearly vibrato-less tones. The collection ends with “Make You Feel My Love”, which Jackson plays with a kind of sweet dignity. He is a star in my book. Jackson’s Dylan collection is well thought out and beautifully rendered.

Michael Ullman studied classical clarinet and was educated at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the U. of Michigan, from which he received a PhD in English. The author or co-author of two books on jazz, he has written on jazz and classical music for the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, High Fidelity, Stereophile, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and other venues. His articles on Dickens, Joyce, Kipling, and others have appeared in academic journals. For over 30 years, he has written a bimonthly jazz column for Fanfare Magazine, for which he also reviews classical music. He is emeritus at Tufts University, where he taught mostly modernist writers in the English Department and jazz and blues history in the Music Department.