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Fact #61403

When:

Short story:

Bob Dylan performs with The New Tokyo Symphony Orchestra at The Great Music Experience, an all-star show at Todai-ji Temple, Nara, Japan, Asia. The event, which also features Joni Mitchell, The Chieftains, Ry Cooder, Jon Bon Jovi, INXS, Wayne Shorter and Richie Sambora is broadcast live in over 50 countries.

Full article:

Paul 'Wix' Wickens (pianist, Musical Director) : That was The Great Music Experience held outside a temple in Osaka, Japan, with Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, some of my all-time heroes. My functions included organising the house band, but there was also a classical orchestra, The Tokyo Philharmonic, directed by Michael Kamen, Kodo drummers, a Japanese folk orchestra.

I remember us all getting together, the heads of department if you like, and saying, 'How the hell are we going to make this work?' I mean, one of Bob Dylan's most distinctive features is that he is not predictable, and yet he was going to be playing with an orchestra.

He's a complete maverick, even more so than Neil Young. Dylan just does his own thing and you have to try and keep up. He'll start a song in a different key, or sometimes the band won't even know what song he's playing, so they have to wait til they recognise it and then join in. Possibly that's how he keeps himself amused.

In that concert, the first three days of rehearsal were a train wreck. He was playing with the orchestra but he'd throw in an extra bar, which you can't do under those circumstances. We had to work out a way of operating with a series of cards, A, B and C, so we could stop them at A and start them again at B and so on. But when it came to the actual performance, he played it straight down the line, just as we'd rehearsed it. So either he was messing with us, or it was just his way of amusing himself.

My most distinctive memory of that, which was a fabulous event, is that Joni Mitchell flew in late. We'd finished for the day and there were just a few of us left at the temple, sorting out equipment and stuff, and Joni Mitchell walked in and she was to rehearse the next day but she hadn't decided what she was going to play. So she pulled out her guitars, sat in a corner with two or three guitars around her, she didn't know we were there, and she just played her songs to herself. We all kept our heads down. We didn't want her to see us because she would probably stop. So were there for this magic moment when she wasn't performing to anybody. She was playing her babies to herself, to figure out what she wanted to do the next day. We heard half a dozen absolute classics, as pure and as honest as you can get because she was playing only to herself. It was one of those moments when all the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. We were so lucky to hear that. It bypassed your ears and went straight to your heart. It's that communication from human to human, which goes right back to the Stone Age.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, July 2013, for Musician magazine)