Shadows in the Night, Bob Dylan, Columbia
It’s not a put-on. Bob Dylan’s Shadows in the Night, an album of 10 songs that were all recorded by Frank Sinatra, is a tribute from one venerated American musician to another, a reconsideration of a school of songwriting, a feat of technical nostalgia and a reckoning with love and death.
Dylan devotes the album to a particular subset of the Sinatra legacy. It’s not Sinatra the airborne swinger or Sinatra the voice of confidence. It’s the Sinatra who made thematic albums about separation and heartache — albums like Where Are You? in 1957, which included four of the songs Dylan revives, and No One Cares (1959) and All Alone (1962), which each supply one. They are ballads, mostly Tin Pan Alley standards, sophisticated enough to be utterly succinct. They never move faster than midtempo and they often luxuriate in melancholy; they testify, above all, to loneliness.
Shadows in the Night (Columbia) offers bait for trivia seekers. Sinatra was born in 1915, 100 years ago. The opening track, I’m a Fool to Want You, is one of very few songs with a Sinatra songwriting credit. The front cover emulates the vertical-bar design of the jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s album Hub-Tones, which was released — like Dylan’s debut album — in 1962. The photo on the back poses Dylan and a masked woman in formal wear at a nightclub table, alluding, perhaps, to the 1966 Black and White Ball, a masked ball that gathered a glittering assortment of 1960s celebrities, including Sinatra and his new wife, Mia Farrow. In the photo, Dylan holds a Sun Records single, a touch of rock; its title is too grainy to decipher.
But there’s no posing in the music. Dylan brought his touring band to a studio where Sinatra often recorded, Capitol Records’ Studio B, and he sang the songs with his five-man touring band. They recorded live and listening to one another in the room without headphones; turn the album up too loud and you can hear amplifiers humming as songs begin and end.
“There was no tuning and there was no fixing,” the album’s engineer, Al Schmitt, said in an online interview. “Everything is what it was.”
The arrangements are largely of a piece. The young, suave Sinatra found tragedy and melodrama in these songs, which he often sang as slowly as Dylan does. But where Sinatra had string orchestras, Dylan has Donny Herron’s pedal-steel guitar, perpetually hovering and gliding, and Tony Garnier’s bass, often bowed with grave watchfulness. The guitars of Charlie Sexton and Stu Kimball melt into the chords; the drummer George Receli relies on brushes. And for these songs, Dylan presents yet another changed voice: not the wrathful scrape of his recent albums, but a subdued, sustained tone. It’s still ragged; he is 73. But he carefully honors the melodies, even the trickier chromatic ones, and he fully inhabits the lyrics.
He’s not suave; he has seen too much. In I’m a Fool to Want You, he begs, “Pity me, I need you,” knowing full well that he’s embracing misery. Autumn Leaves isn’t a throwaway jazz exercise but a reflection on solitude and advancing time. Full Moon and Empty Arms, adapted from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, becomes a ghostly country shuffle; even as Dylan sings about wishing for a reunion, his voice knows better than to hope. Dylan has been performing Stay With Me, sung by Sinatra for the 1963 film The Cardinal, to end his recent concerts; it’s a humble prayer, and Dylan sings it on the album with weary repentance.
Not every song thrives under Dylan’s treatment. Some Enchanted Evening is stiff, and Why Try to Change Me Now denies the song’s humor. But even when it falters, Shadows in the Night maintains its singular mood: lovesick, haunted, suspended between an inconsolable present and all the regrets of the past.
— Jon Pareles
Wallflower, Diana Krall, Verve Records
Diana Krall sounds glum and fatigued on Wallflower, a collection of ‘70s and ‘80s songs associated with the Eagles, Elton John, the Carpenters and others, that sustains a mood of quiet desperation. The muted, wistful tone is established with the opening cut, California Dreamin’, the Mamas and the Papas’ first hit in which Krall’s somnolent delivery suggests a snowbound New Englander longing for brighter days and happier times on a frigid winter evening. It is deepened by her rendition of Desperado, the Eagles’ ballad comparing a rock star’s grueling life on the road to the exhaustion of an aging cowboy reluctant to come in from the range.
The most evocative cut is the Carpenters’ hit Superstar, the plea to a rock star by a besotted fan to remember her long after their dalliance. As Krall murmurs “Loneliness is such a sad affair,” sounding like Peggy Lee in her sultry boudoir mode, those words define an album whose other depictions of unhappy relationships include I Can’t Tell You Why, Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, Don’t Dream It’s Over, I’m Not in Love and Alone Again (Naturally), sung with Michael Buble.
Wallflower was produced and arranged by the megahit maker David Foster, whose lush but static string arrangements, written by William Ross, couch each song on a soft feather bed. Where Krall usually plays vigorous keyboards on her albums, here her pianism is all but absent. Most of the fills, played by Foster, are strictly routine. It’s all the more mystifying because Krall, when prodded by a rhythm section, can really swing. But on Wallflower, drums are minimal.
The record, whose title song is an obscure, country-inflected Bob Dylan number, has the feel of a sullen concept album by a woman who feels abandoned. It is tempting to imagine that it reflects the frustrations of her marriage to Elvis Costello. These two great musicians, after all, are driven workhorses who are on the road much of the time on separate tours. Loneliness is such a sad affair.
— Stephen Holden
Break Stuff, Vijay Iyer Trio, ECM
The pianist Vijay Iyer publishes his compositions under the name Multiplicity Music, and that word goes to the heart of his enterprise as an artist. He’s led an important jazz-tradition trio for most of the last decade, but he’s also been writing music inspired by other traditions and functions, working with poets and emcees and string quartets. He doesn’t just improvise, he teaches a class in aesthetic and social theories of improvisation, at Harvard; he makes music that not only intersects different strategies but lingers over the places of intersection.
Hood, from Break Stuff — the fifth and best record by Iyer’s trio, and the first on ECM — was inspired by the Detroit techno producer Robert Hood. It’s a kind of process piece, an analysis of an intersection, that you could imagine being used as an excerpted interlude on someone else’s record. On this one it’s an event, a centerpiece, amid other blocks of material. Iyer and the drummer Marcus Gilmore fall in and out of sync, moving in repetitions with different rhythm and tempo; the bassist Stephan Crump negotiates between them in small strokes, subtly connecting. Sometimes Gilmore’s playing sounds flexible, and Iyer’s sounds rigid; then their playing fuses, or swaps character. Iyer’s keyboard sound gradually changes, and his chords gradually change, too, widening and evolving, turning into arpeggiated motion.
The trio makes sense in a physical way, moving together as one unit. And it’s good how evolved that motion can sound in a piece as strange as Hood, because over the course of the record, the strength of the track takes the heat off Iyer’s versions of songs by his heroes (Thelonious Monk’s Work, Billy Strayhorn’s Bloodcount, John Coltrane’s Countdown). Those versions aren’t formal stunts — least of all the slow, elegant Bloodcount. They’re just more refined representations of the way Iyer and his trio perform in real time, with a rhythmic logic and a coordinated bustle of breaks and intersections. Likewise, the album’s reduced or evolved sections of two commissioned suites from 2013 don’t seem like material from other assignments. The band’s refractive language makes sense of whatever material it plays. You don’t hear the record and seize on its sense of rupture or argument. Instead, it sounds whole.
— Ben Ratliff
Coin Coin Chapter Three: river run thee, Matana Roberts, Constellation
“I like to tell stories,” Matana Roberts says, with an offhanded frankness, at one point deep into the immersive experience of her new album, Coin Coin Chapter Three: river run thee. It’s just one of many scraps of text and sound assembled therein, and far from the most gripping. But that plain-spoken declaration is a key to comprehending Roberts and the motivations of her art — in particular, Coin Coin, a 12-part cycle of personal, socio-historical and psychic inquisition.
An alto saxophonist and composer originally from Chicago, Roberts has found oblique but potent uses for narrative throughout her Coin Coin series, in performance and on two albums, released in 2011 and 2013. Working with folklore, family archives, public records and other faded ephemera, she’s creating her own patchwork monument to African-American history, a tale of harrowing struggle and brittle stoicism.
Coin Coin Chapter Three is the first installment to feature no musicians other than herself, which puts a stark emphasis on the interiority of the work. Roberts recorded the album in layers, overdubbing parts in real time: vocal recitations; ribbons of song; keening saxophones; analog synth drones; ambient sampled material. In the notes, she refers to the album as “a fever dream of sound,” an accurate sensory impression. (She’ll perform this material on Tuesday night at Union Pool in Brooklyn.)
Her tone wheels between dispassion and despair, neither side achieving the upper hand. “Oh, why do we try so hard?” she cries in All Is Written, the opening track. “All is written in the cards.” Later she reads clinically from the ship’s log of a 19th-century slave vessel and reflects with eerie calm on the double-crossing of a people. Every sonic element — her voice, her saxophone, the clip of a baby crying — comes woven into a tapestry, with no stable relationship of foreground to background.
One exception comes at the album’s finish, with a recording of a speech delivered by Malcolm X on Feb. 14, 1965 — the same day that his house had been firebombed, one week before his assassination. “I am not a racist in any form whatsoever,” he says, his voice fading against a glow of synthesizers, the ending of that story artfully left unsaid.
— NATE CHINEN
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