I Did It My Way-Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night
CD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Shadows In The Night, Bob Dylan,
2015
It was bound to happen if he lived long
enough. Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP
generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically
by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts,
the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World
War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra. The
music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the
Gerswhins and so on. That proposition though seems less strange if you are not
totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he, whether
he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching
the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.
What Dylan has been about for the
greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his
songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. What Dylan
had also been about had been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook
(look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t
Look Back or stuff from the Basement tapes). In the old days that
was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the
slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But
the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he
broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of overall
tradition and now his hero is Frank Sinatra. I may long for the old protest
songs, the roots music, the odd and unusual but Dylan has sought to entertain
and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard
Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice
(it was always about the lyrics not the voice) I wonder though how much
production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly
as the chairman of the boards.
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