T Bone Burnett’s NYC Tribute to Bob Dylan, With Sara Bareilles and Oscar Isaac Among the Cast, Is Worthy of a Bard: Concert Review

variety.com:

A.D. Amorosi There’s a handsome backstory to Friday night’s concert “The Town Hall and T Bone Burnett Present a Tribute to Bob Dylan” — produced in partnership with the Bob Dylan Center — that went beyond present-day artists merely doing a set of covers.

Dylan. New York City’s Town Hall. The two go hand-in-hand like whiskey and soda. In 1963, when the bourgeoning poet-folkie could no longer be confined by Greenwich Village’s coffee houses, his shrewd then-manager Albert Grossman chose the civic hall built by the League for Political Education to mark Dylan’s major league debut and unite his social consciousness with commerce for the first (but not the last) time.Dylan and T Bone Burnett also go hand-in-hand like whiskey and pretty-much-anything.

Not only did Dylan pluck Burnett to be a guitarist on his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour of the late 1970s, Burnett recently produced Dylan’s one-off recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for Burnett’s Ionic Original acetate-format project with an auction price of nearly $1.8M. (Burnett is also linked to Town Hall with his smart co-production of 2013’s “Another Day, Another Time at the Hall”) in celebration of the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ’60s folk love letter “Inside Llewyn Davis.” With so many ties-that-bind, in celebration of the Town Hall’s Centennial and Dylan’s first appearance there, Burnett’s curated show promised to be a wizened, witty treat with the early inclusion of Sara Bareilles, Joe Henry, Margaret Glaspy, Joy Harjo, the McCrary Sisters, Mumu Fresh, Punch Brothers, Lizz Wright and the “Pocket Orchestra” of guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage.