Club Red: Joan Osborne Sings Bob Dylan, 8/3

30 Jul Club Red: Joan Osborne Sings Bob Dylan, 8/3

Beyond the Groove is pleased to present Joan Osborne singing the songs of Bob Dylan  at Club Red in the Telluride Conference Center, Mountain Village. This show is seated and the band is an acoustic trio.  The event takes place Thursday, August 3. Doors open 8 p.m.; show time is 8:30 p.m. Tickets are 35-$55 here. All ages. 

Scroll down for a Joan Osborne sampler, including a video featuring Osborne with two other super stars: Mavis Staples, who is closing the Telluride Jazz Fest and Bonnie Raitt who is featured at Telluride Blues & Brews. (Just ’cause.)

All shows at Club Red are produced by Denise Mongan of Beyond the Groove Productions, with major support by Telluride Ski & Golf, the Telluride Conference Center, Inn at Lost Creek, and the Peaks Resort and Spa. For more information, go here. 

Club Red

Joan Osborne has rightfully earned a reputation as one of the great voices of her generation, both as a commanding, passionate performer and a frank, emotionally evocative songwriter. A multi-platinum selling recording artist and seven-time Grammy nominee, the soulful vocalist is a highly sought-after collaborator and guest performer who has performed alongside many notable artists, including Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Luciano Pavarotti, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, and Mavis Staples, to name a few.

Osborne, who’s successfully covered everyone from Billie Holliday to Muddy Waters to Jerry Garcia, has turned her sights on the Nobel Prize winner on a tour originally billed as the Joan Osborne Acoustic Trio, which then morphed into Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan.

Joan Osborne singing Bob Dylan at Café Carlyle. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“…as both a songwriter and interpreter, she looks life squarely in the face. Any self-pity has to be earned and is inseparable from a tinge of self-disgust. She treats Mr. Dylan as a fellow troubadour and roustabout, inventing the rules while traveling along an endless road…,” raved The New York Times.

“The Queen’s Hall reverted to its original use as a church on Sunday. It was the church of Bob Dylan, though, as Joan Osborne drew on her southern states upbringing, and possibly something gained from touring with the great gospel-soul singer Mavis Staples, in refreshing songs from across Dylan’s extensive catalogue.

“Some of these songs don’t need much, if anything, to be brought bang up to date and Osborne’s apologies on behalf of the American electorate helped to give a particularly sharp edge to Masters of War,” The Herald,  Scotland.

“…I have seen a number of descriptions of Osborne’s singing as ‘soulful.’ That word seems apt. In addition to having a rich voice, she approaches both the music and lyrics with a committed and intelligent sophistication. The equal emphasis on the lyrics is obviously now particularly important as Dylan has been officially acknowledged as a literary force…,” Charged.fm.

And this is not Dylan – but features some upcoming Telluride showstoppers:

From Joan Osborne’s website:

On Songs of Bob Dylan, Joan Osborne unleashes her sizable gifts as a vocalist and interpreter upon The Bard’s celebrated canon. With performances honed by the time Osborne spent polishing them during “Joan Osborne Sings The Songs Of Bob Dylan” —  two critically acclaimed two-week residencies she performed at New York City’s Café Carlyle in March 2016 and 2017, the seven-time Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling singer and songwriter, whom The New York Times has called “a fiercely intelligent, no-nonsense singer,” winds her supple, soulful voice around Dylan’s poetic, evocative lyrics, etching gleaming new facets in them along the way.

“I try not to do a straight-up imitation of what someone else has done,” Osborne says. “Like if you’re going to sing an Otis Redding song, you’re never going to out-Otis him so you shouldn’t even try. So I always try to find some unique way into the song, and also to pick songs where the intersection between the song and my voice hits some kind of sweet spot. It was a joy being able to sing these brilliant lyrics. It’s like an actor being given a great part. You are just so excited to say these lines because they’re so powerful that it lifts you up above yourself.”

The album spans Dylan’s beloved standards from the ’60s and ’70s (“Masters of War,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Buckets of Rain,” “Tangled Up In Blue”) to some of Osborne’s favorites from his later albums, including “Dark Eyes” (from 1985’s Empire Burlesque), “Ring Them Bells” (from 1989’s Oh Mercy), “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (from 1997’s Time Out of Mind), and “High Water” (from 2001’s Love and Theft). “His versions are legendary and I’m not trying to improve on them,” Osborne says. “I’m just trying to sing beautiful songs and let people hear them. It’s about trying to give a different shade of meaning to something that’s already great. I happen to think Dylan is a great singer, but I will never, in a million years, sound like him, which almost made it easier.”

Unconstrained by any notion of trying to imitate or surpass Dylan, Osborne felt free to play with the songs’ arrangements, a process that was also enabled by the virtuosity and versatility of Osborne’s collaborators, guitarist Jack Petruzzelli (Patti Smith, The Fab Faux) and keyboardist Keith Cotton (Idina Menzel, Chris Cornell), who performed with her at Café Carlyle, and with whom she co-produced the album. “They bring this wealth of skills to the table,” she says. “Any crazy idea we came up with, they could do. So it was wonderful to have that level of musicianship at my fingertips.” Half the songs were recorded with the trio and the other half feature a full band.

In Osborne and her musicians’ hands, Dylan’s songs take on varied new shapes…

More here.