Bob Dylan
Shadows In The Night
Columbia 88875057962

www.columbiarecords.com
 

I once asked the late Mimi Baez Farińa what Bob Dylan is like as a person. She replied that she didn’t know because she hadn’t seen him in awhile and he changes all the time. Over the past 50-plus years, the mercurial Mr. Dylan has repeatedly surprised us musically: electric rock at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, pastoral Nashville Skyline, born-again Christianity and then an embrace of his ancestral Judaism.

Some listeners were apprehensive when word went out that Dylan’s new Shadows in the Night CD was a collection of songs Frank Sinatra had recorded. But hearing Donny Herron’s wide-open pedal steel guitar notes opening the disc with a “Happy Trails”-like vibe, I instantly knew it would have wonderful moments.

Dylan has said of the album, “I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a five-piece band.” Producing using his pseudonym Jack Frost, he’s safely kept the accompaniment discreet and subdued to fit his weathered, occasionally hoarse voice. Herron’s understated input is invaluable.

Ballads strongly identified with Sinatra – such as “Strangers in the Night” – are wisely avoided (though it’s fun to wonder what Dylan could have done with “Witchcraft”). The best tracks come from The Great American Songbook. As a kid in Minnesota, did Bobby Zimmerman hear parents Abe and Beatty singing songs like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s dreamy “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific around the house?

There’s always been a connection between folk and pop (not that labeling music or drawing lines between genres are especially good ideas). The Weavers’ glory days on the pop charts were just the tip of an iceberg. After all, Judy Collins has credited a 1950 LP, Jo Stafford Sings American Folk Songs, with leading her to traditional music. In the 1940s and ’50s, numerous Frankie Laine hits were “folkish” as well.

The Great American Songbook is of any time and all times. Prior to Shadows in the Night, Irving Berlin’s bittersweet “What’ll I Do” had appeared on, for example, 1998’s The McGarrigle Hour.

Then there’s “Autumn Leaves,” whose tristesse makes it a good companion to “What’ll I Do.” It was originally composed in 1945 in French as “Les Feuilles Mortes” (translation: “The Dead Leaves”) by Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert. Two years later, it was given English lyrics by song maestro Johnny Mercer, and soon recorded by Stafford. Countless other singers did it well, but it has only made the pop “Top 20” once: in 1955, when Roger Williams’ version became the only piano instrumental to ever make #1 in Billboard. Joan Baez, whose early albums on Vanguard all had foreign-language songs, recorded it in French in her 1967 sessions with baroque arranger Peter Schickele (of PDQ Bach fame), but her version never saw the light of day until 2003’s expanded release of Joan. Eric Clapton covered it in 2010 on Clapton. Now it’s a high point of Shadows in the Night.

Of all 1949’s competing versions of “That Lucky Old Sun,” it was Laine’s that hit #1 – perhaps due to his huge, melodramatic voice. (Imagine what Paul Robeson could have done with it.) It can be seen as an end-of-life song. With Dylan wearily voicing hope for a cloud with a silver lining to lift him to Paradise, it’s a fine finale for an album filled with a virtue Dylan’s discs haven’t always sought, for all their genius. That virtue is charm.

— Bruce Sylvester