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.