... this fifty year thing

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

the Graun has a piece on the release of Subterranean Homesick Blues and the Bringing All Back Home Dylan album .... there will be a lot of this as us boomers wend our way to the crematoria &c ....

but the pop and Dylan stuff arrived after some classic jazz masterpieces had radicalised any cat worth knowing back then

for example Blues & Roots by Mingus, and this track from Presents Mingus especially:

with my ears buried in my cheap Savoy lps of Charlie Parker, Mingus albums and Ornette Coleman i did not hear the Beatles or Dylan until it became clear that was what the young ladies were listening to .... even then it was Ray Charles or John Lee Hooker that we used for party music if not Sonny Rollins Hold 'Em Joe or the entire Blues & Roots album ...

[Quarky]

That was precisely my problem Calum.....unfortunately I compounded the problem by going into the mainstream Classical tastes of a lady friend. Eventually I was put onto the rocky path by another lady friend who played Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Lela, I shot the Sheriff, and Imagine.....remember those?

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm trying to recall... 1965... I don't remember being invited to any parties...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i don't remember 1965 at all well ....

[Gordon]

And Kind of Blue? That was a musical watershed not a politically motivated one. Later in the 60s "radicalisation" in political terms was to some extent demonstrated by Dylan [love "World War 3 Blues" but perhaps its humour drew its venom?] - "A Hard Rain's gonna fall" among others but I'm not that convinced by the article that that album did it. "Protest" was spurred on later by Flower Power and more strident anti VN war stuff? I was in my early twenties in the mid 60s and I don't remember thinking of Dylan as being that "radical". He was perhaps part of a wider protest movement - as were Peter, Paul and Mary who supported the civil rights movement!! Looks for coat.

[Ian Thumwood]

I can't understand what all the fuss is about Bob Dylan but it is interesting the way that the 1960's get singled out as being the turning point with popular culture and social attitudes whereas I would suggest that the 1920's were far more significant. Because there aren't any people around who match the "baby boomer" generation, it seems easier to write up the 1960's as being so significant whereas I don't really think that Dylan can ever be regarded as being as radical as Louis Armstrong or even someone like Bessie Smith.

It is interesting that pop music seemed to have taken longer to come up with the "classic" LP nearly ten years after jazz had managed to achieve this with labels like CBS , Blue Note and Prestige managing to release albums throughout the 1950's that immediately gained cult status. Perhaps jazz was not able to reach the audiences that pop music could but there were countless commercial LP's issued throughout the 1950's which don't have anywhere the same appeal with record collectors in the way that Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling stone, etc, did in the 1960's.

Personally, I grew up listening to jazz and never listened to any pop music until a friend loaned me Sting's "Dream of the blue turtles" which included the likes of Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland in the line up. Nowadays I am more open minded in my musical taste yet still think that pop struggles to produce albums that are consistently excellent through their play list. The Sting album is an exception and something like Tom Waits' "The heart of Saturday night" is a masterpiece. Ditto Kate Bush's "The hounds of love." Yet, if you grab most critically acclaimed pop albums they are extremely uneven so that there are tracks on albums by the likes of musicians I admire such as Bjork that would not have got issued by the likes of Miles, Ellington, etc, etc.