Gather 'Round People: Songs of Dylan. Steve Alves sings. Kenny Butler plays guitar. Bob Dylan's words out front, guitar underneath. No imitation act.

Steve Alves sings Dylan's songs. Kenny Butler plays guitar. That's the show. The songs raw nerves. Love songs, hard songs, songs of departure, warning, humor, desire, accusation, memory, prophecy, loneliness, and sudden light. Songs blaze and crack throughout the concert. If you want to sing and play a Dylan song you have to put all of yourself into the tune, and that is what these two do. "Don't Think Twice." "Simple Twist of Fate." "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall." "Buckets of Rain." Nobody dresses up as Bob Dylan. Nobody freezes the records in place. Incredible songs, songs like nothing else, played as living music.

Dylan's music hit Steve Alves early and hit him hard. It made him want to play guitar. The voice and the writing seeped so far into his life that he eventually stopped singing Dylan's songs altogether, to get out from under the influence. Kenny Butler's idea was to turn that around. Not to copy Dylan. To have Alves take everything he knows and feels about the work and sing it with total freedom.

So that's the show. Alves sings. Butler plays. Words out front, guitar underneath.

When you listen to Dylan's songs you don't have to ask questions. You already know the song. You know what's going on. You know the score. The surface is simple. A few chords, a direct melody, a familiar form, and underneath it the music is full of ideas and character. The vocal phrases enter late, early, or sideways. A melody can be plainspoken and then, in an unexpected syncopation, land somewhere that sparks the next idea. The songs raw nerves. They blaze and crack throughout the concert.

Alves is a songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and documentary filmmaker with a lifetime around American music and storytelling. In this show he does one thing: he delivers the words, the scenes, the characters, the heartbreak and the jokes, the rhythm of the language. You have to know how to use your breath to sing these songs, and Alves has reached into every line and word to find rhythmic details.

Butler is a composer and improviser who has worked in Delta blues, Mississippi hill-country blues, fingerstyle guitar, jazz, Irish music, classical orchestra, and Shakespeare performance. Sworn to the word of bebop, witness to the blues, a Shakespearean radical on six strings. The resume isn't the point. The point is that the guitar has shape, force, and its own voice. It doesn't strum behind the singer. It gives each song its ground: bass, rhythm, harmony, inner movement, tension, release, color, and life. A compact six-string band for the singer to surf on.

The arrangements are built song by song. The question is never what can be added. It's, "What is this song asking for?" Sometimes a hard rhythmic pulse. Sometimes a thumping bass line. Sometimes Butler plays most of it the way Dylan did and then lets the fingerstyle open up inside the rhythm. The set moves from quiet to driving and back. The repertoire runs from "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Masters of War" through "Mr. Tambourine Man," "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Isis," "The Man in Me," and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," and sets are built for the room.

The material is not a monument. It is living music and stories. Alves and Butler have listened to it across decades, album after album, and they keep finding more in it. They play theaters, arts centers, clubs and listening rooms, festivals and town events, where the songs carry lived history but the performance is current and spirited. Not a nostalgia package. Not a costume version of Bob Dylan. Two men who love to play and perform songs of Dylan.