New Music
By JON PARELES, STEPHEN HOLDEN, BEN RATLIFF and NATE CHINEN
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.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Dylan’s debut album — in 1962. The photo on the back poses Mr. 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, Mr. Dylan holds a Sun Records single, a touch of rock; its title is too grainy to decipher.
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“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. Ms. 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
A version of this review appears in print on February 3, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: One Musician Honors Another. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
