“God Knows,” to quote the title of a 1990 Bob Dylan song, why there is a sudden eruption of interest in the iconoclastic singersongwriter. It’s not like it’s his birthday or anything, but in the last few months there has been a short-lived Broadway show, a considerably better-received all-star tribute concert at Avery Fisher Hall, as well as what may well be the first jazz instrumental album of his music. Right now, within a seven-day period, there are no less than three very different concert presentations of Dylan songs by three idiosyncratic performers who have absolutely nothing in common with one another — or with Mr. Dylan.

It would be surprising to see this much activity surrounding the music of any composer, from Mozart to Irving Berlin, but in Mr. Dylan’s case, it’s especially unusual. After all, he is not so much a performer and a writer as a oneman mega-force who completely changed the shape of popular music, ushering in the singer-songwriter age during the 1960s. From that point forward, Tony Bennett once told me, “record companies didn’t take you seriously unless you wrote your own songs.” Author Alex Halberstadt, in his new biography of the rock songwriter Doc Pomus, describes Mr. Dylan as “the boy genius who singlehandedly demolished the Brill Building.” Unlike every composer before him, Mr. Dylan’s message to performers was not “sing my songs and earn me royalties,” but rather, “go forth and write your own damn songs!”

Despite his importance, Mr. Dylan (and others, like the Beatles) also signaled the end of the Great Age of Interpretation, as well as a certain level of professionalism in terms of both composing and singing. For the last 40 years, every musical artist has been expected to be his or her own Bob Dylan. That’s why it’s somewhat startling that, in the pop icon’s 65th year, so many artists are singing Mr. Dylan’s songs — and reinterpreting them in their own way. It’s almost as if they are deliberately ignoring his message by doing so.

Between last Thursday and this weekend, New York Dylan fans were and will be treated to classic Dylan songs re-created as classical music, cabaret, and folk-blues. Last Thursday at Symphony Space, the soprano Amy Burton and the pianist Stephen Gosling performed John Corigliano’s song cycle from 2000, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which set eight of Mr. Dylan’s “poems” to more sophisticated music. Essentially, the composer did for Mr. Dylan what Schubert did for Goethe. Here, the tale of the tambourine man becomes a showcase for coloratura similar to “the Bell Song” from “Lakme” or Leonard Bernstein’s “Glitter and Be Gay.” Mr. Corigliano’s music is decidedly postmodern, which heightens the drama and intensifies the accusatory message of Mr. Dylan’s “Masters of War,” using Bartok or Berglike dissonances to vividly depict a world gone wacko.

The singer-songwriter-guitarist Howard Fishman already performed his program “The Bob Dylan Basement Tapes Project” last Spring at Joe’s Pub, a live recording of which will be released, and he will reprise the show this Thursday at the Allen Room. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Fishman emerged as a unique performer with his mixture of folk, blues, standards, and jazz; he was equal parts Jimmie Rodgers, Emmett Miller, and Ukulele Ike, and dressed accordingly in Great Depression drag. In the “Basement Tapes,” Mr. Fishman does not so much reinterpret Mr. Dylan’s songs as preinterpret them, taking the music back to its roots and making it sound like it might have been performed had Mr. Dylan been working in Tulsa, Okla., in the early ’30s. In “I Shall Be Released,” which Mr. Fishman’s performs with a female singer named Nan Swift, Mr. Dylan wrote “every distance is not near,” but 70 years ago, the distance between hillbilly, blues, and jazz was a lot smaller.

Released a few months ago, “Trouble: The Jamie Saft Trio Plays the Music of Bob Dylan” is the most successful attempt to translate Mr. Dylan’s lyric-driven songs into the jazz piano idiom. Several numbers, such as “What Was It You Wanted,” with its march-like snare played by the drummer Ben Perowsky, use a rock-inflected, heavy keyboard touch and a staccato rhythm reminiscent of the “covers” of contempo-pop hits by the Bad Plus. “Dirge” takes the composer at his word, and, played primarily as a bass solo by Greg Cohen, sounds more like the dirges he frequently plays with Ornette Coleman. “Disease of Conceit” is a hymn-like showcase for Mr. Saft’s electric organ-playing.

Yet of all the new takes on Mr. Dylan, none is more essential than Barb Jungr’s ongoing show at the Metropolitan Room, which continues through Saturday. Ms. Jungr’s 2002 album, “Every Grain of Sand,” was the breakthrough that proved Bob Dylan songs could be re-addressed and made vital all over again by performers in vastly different genres, just like those of Stephen Sondheim or Jerome Kern. The current show, “Barb Jungr Sings Bob Dylan,” features all of the strongest songs from the album, such as the declamatory sermon “Ring Them Bells” and the erotic “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” done with accordion like a musette waltz. There are also new pieces, such as “Blind Willie McTell,” a basic blues elaborated into a tricky 5/4 rhythm and a stark, Sinatra-inspired saloon treatment of “Like a Rolling Stone.” On the latter, Ms. Jungr whispers the famous retort that everybody else shouts: “How does it feel?” She almost swallows these payoff lines, much in the same way that Bob Hope made a joke funnier by muttering the punch line under his breath.

In his 2004 autobiography, “Chronicle,” Mr. Dylan wrote that he was profoundly influenced by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny,” yet it remained for Ms. Jungr to show that Mr. Dylan’s songs can be interpreted with the same sort of sensitivity and nuance as those of Weill. For all of the complexity and fantastic imagery of his texts, my favorite remains the simplest and most direct of his works, 1974’s “Forever Young,” which Ms. Jungr sings like a toast at a Jewish wedding, a first cousin to Frank Loesser’s “More I Can Not Wish You.” It’s so straightforward and sincere that it doesn’t even sound like Mr. Dylan at all — maybe it’s actually by Robert Allen Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota.

wfriedwald@nysun.com