Bob Dylan
"Triplicate"
(Columbia (ASTERISK)(ASTERISK)(ASTERISK))
In case you weren't convinced Bob Dylan was serious about this standards-singing thing after his first set of Sinatra-associated songs with "Shadows in the Night" in 2015 or his second with "Fallen Angels" in 2016, the gravelly voiced Bard has now tripled down on his Great American Songbook concept. This three-disc, 30-song set contains not one word or note written by the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Instead, it gathers up familiar and not-so-familiar pre-rock romances by Hoagy Carmichael, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Cy Coleman & Carolyn Leigh, and Jimmy Van Heusen & Sammy Cahn. Haters of latter-day Dylan's acid-bath voice need not apply. But fans of the not-merely-pretty will find plenty to enjoy in the ways his touring band gently swings such equally sentimental and profound masterworks as "The Best Is Yet to Come," "Imagination," and "Stormy Weather," while being moved by the way Dylan, now past the September of his years, teases out meaning from other people's lyrics that he seems to regard with more reverence and respect than he does his own.
_Dan DeLuca
