Philadelphia Weekly

Howard Fishman
Fri., June 22, 8pm. $23. World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St. 215.222.1400. www.worldcafe live.com

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Brooklyn's Howard Fishman is a wandering spirit, a diligent student of Americana. It's accurate to call him a guitarist and singer/songwriter, but that says little about the breadth of his work. Early jazz and Tin Pan Alley, bare-bones rock, old-time country and folk, New Orleans brass band music: Fishman is plugged into all these idioms and always sounds like himself.

He's landed multiple features on NPR, steady gigs on the road and countless engagements at Joe's Pub and other hotspots in New York. In February he energized Lincoln Center's American Songbook series with his interpretation of Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes. Now he's Philly-bound, bringing the show to World Cafe Live this week.

The Basement Tapes, recorded in 1967 and released as a two-LP set in 1975, is one of the most peculiar objects in the rock canon--a jumble of outtakes that coheres like an epic novel. To Fishman it's more than a landmark collaboration; it's a doorway to America's musical past, a model for his own multigenre identity.

Fishman's show, however, is inspired not by the official Basement Tapes release, but by the five-CD bootleg alternately known as The Genuine Basement Tapes or A Tree With Roots, which teems with previously unheard covers and originals. "They play everything from Dock Boggs to Curtis Mayfield," Fishman marvels. "I always thought, what a shame the public at large hasn't heard that side of The Basement Tapes. So I wanted to tackle the whole thing."

Playing a weathered acoustic guitar, Fishman will be joined by Mazz Swift on violin and vocals, Michael Daves on guitar and lap steel, Ron Caswell on tuba and Mark McLean on drums. They'll draw on the full Basement Tapes repertoire, but also some of the historically related material mentioned by Greil Marcus in his book The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (first published as Invisible Republic). Fishman will even pause to give short readings from the book.

In his liner notes to the legit Basement Tapes, Marcus identified "a feeling of age, a kind of classicism" in the music, an environment of "plain-talk mystery" in which "language ... is completely unfettered." Fishman conveys these elusive qualities in his arrangements, some of which can be heard on his Basement Tapes CD/DVD, recorded live at Joe's Pub last year.

Clearly, liberties are taken: keys transposed, rhythms altered, personal touches added. Fishman's voice, though similarly unvarnished, sounds nothing like Dylan's. One of the most striking numbers is "Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)," Dylan's upbeat 20-bar blues which Fishman transforms into a minor-key lament--an oblique comment on New Orleans, where Fishman lived for three years in the early '90s.

Creative interchange of this sort is what first drew Fishman to The Basement Tapes. "To me the album sounds like they're showing each other their tricks," he says. "Dylan's showing the Band the old folk, blues and country, and they're showing Dylan the new rock, R&B and soul. They're teaching each other through these songs."

This pedagogy, in a way, mirrors Fishman's own. "When I started out at 17," he recalls, "all I played was Bob Dylan songs. But Dylan became the guide to go back further, to old country and blues and jazz. Then I became obsessed with that and forgot about Dylan. When I went back as far as I could go, I started working my way forward again. So the Basement Tapes project is a full circle back to Dylan for me."