A Knife A Fork a Bottle and a Cork

To make use of the new parlance this month this is a field (audience) recording of superb quality, well balanced with a warm natural feel. The vocals are defined, and the instrumentation is separated but all without feeling artificially isolated. There's an air of expectancy that runs throughout the recording and as soon as the announcement is made the seemingly random tuning evolves rapidly into the opening bars of Sweet Marie and Dylan pounces on top of it. hitting the ground running. There's no warm-up opener tonight. Tonight they're straight into it. Dylan's vocals are confident, warm, mellow. I Want You: Dylan implies a depth and variation to the texture of the lyrics, vocal inflections that are almost under- stated. Refusing to be drawn into the trap of self parody, he explores the lyrics with new tenderness. The songs are untouched ground seen with new eyes. You're A Big Girl Now is stupendous it almost always is but this mellow feel to it, this yearning newness is something else. The band meld together seemlessly, at one with each other and the music, supportive and imaginative but unobtrusive, leaving space for Dylan's vocals to meander.

Cambell's counterpoint vocals on Silvio work in that discordant way that suits Dylan's vocal so well, bringing it into relief, sharpening the edges and yet still sitting behind it, as an echo. Cocaine Blues is outstanding, quite possibly the performance of the evening. I hesitate to make such statements. Isolating a particular song, removing it from the context of the concert, suggests that a show is nothing more than a series of disconnected events of randomly compiled tracks when in truth the performance is the whole show not just it's dissected constituent parts. But I digress and perhaps, this once, I may be forgiven. If the concert may be likened to a Shakespearian play, (and I offer that comparison without any hesitation), then maybe we can consider an individual song as a particularly moving soliloquy. Cocaine Blues fits the bill. Echoing, yearning vocals, hungry. hollow, despairing. And then Master Of War with it's drumming, repetitive march. the imagery piling on top of itself, the vocals fragile and determined. A revitalised Tangled Up In Blue, Bucky's mandolin punctuating the verses, Dylan's vocal betraying an underlying panic. The three tracks from the new album seem to provide the foundation for this new-found approach - a feeling that the music is con- temporary and not retrospective. Not so much that Dylan is revisiting his old songs but that the old songs are revisiting Dylan. The filler tracks slide almost seemlessly into the overall context of the album quirky, slightly out of step Staying Here With You, a masterful, assured, searching Born In Time, and a plaintive Hard Rain are amongst the contributors along with a further two tracks from the new album. A superb disc - warm and soothing. Mellow, I think is the word dejur. .

Tfeb 5