Shelley Posen – Ontario Moon

Shelley Posen

Ontario Moon

Well Done Music

borealisrecords.com

(A version of this review was published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

Shelley Posen is well known throughout the folk music world as a member of Finest Kind, a mostly-retired Ottawa vocal trio known for its glorious harmonies, and as a versatile singer and songwriter whose work touches many genres. Ontario Moon is his fifth solo album and while two of his previous CDs were on specifically Jewish themes, the dozen songs here are purely secular in nature.

One of the things that’s really nice about this album is that each track is uniquely arranged with musicians specifically recruited for the song in question. For example, the title track, a jazzy, romantic tune that recalls the Tin Pan Alley songs that songwriters like Irving Berlin were writing in the 1930s, features a swinging quintet that includes Django Reinhardt-influenced guitarists Christian Flores and Andrew Tesolin, bassist Mike Mopasi, clarinetist Martin van de Ven of the klezmer band Beyond the Pale, and violinist Mika Posen, Shelley’s daughter.

One of the songs I relate to most on the album is “Night Nurse,” a blues featuring the bottleneck guitar virtuosity of Michael Jerome Browne. The song is a tribute to the care Shelley received several years ago when he underwent surgery at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. The song mirrors my own experiences with the night nurses when I had my own surgery at the Heart Institute a few years later.

Other favourites include “The Best Song Ever Written,” a fun country song about songwriting; “Back at Bub’s,” a rock ‘n’ roller about a favourite barbecue joint; “Sugar Bush Breakfast,” a very sweet duet with Montreal singer Linda Morrison; “Tea Time,” a clever paean to afternoon tea at the Royal York featuring a classical string quartet; and “Walking in the Rain,” a delightful little piece that sounds like it could have come from a 1940s musical.

While I’ve mentioned about half the songs on the album, all of the others are just as good.

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–Mike Regenstreif

Nefesh Mountain – Beneath the Open Sky

Nefesh Mountain

Beneath the Open Sky

www.nefeshmountain.com

(A version of this review was published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

Although there are a significant number of Jewish virtuoso bluegrass musicians, the genre itself has rarely been a vehicle for specifically Jewish-themed music. Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys was a great band that combined klezmer and bluegrass traditions but Nefesh Mountain – the husband and wife duo of multi-instrumentalist Eric Lindberg and singer Doni Zasloff – are making Jewish music within a traditional bluegrass framework.

Songs like “Halleluyah,” which I suspect will eventually become a staple in non-Orthodox musical prayer services, and “On and On (L’Dor Vador),” about the continuity of generations, easily flow back and forth from English to Hebrew lyrics, while the traditional bluegrass gospel standard, “Bound for the Promised Land,” is stripped of its Christian references and rewritten by Nefesh Mountain as wishful expression for peace in the Holy Land. One of the most joyous songs is their bluegrass setting of “Oseh Shalom,” and after an intense collection of full band bluegrass tunes, they end the CD quietly with a lovely version of Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby.”

Joining Lindberg and Zasloff on these songs are several A-list bluegrass musicians including banjo maestro Tony Trischka, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, mandolinist Sam Bush and guitarist David Grier.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Bob Dylan – Shadows in the Night

BOB DYLAN

Shadows in the Night

Columbia

bobdylan.com

I was skeptical last year when the news surfaced that Bob Dylan was recording an album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. But listening and re-listening to Shadows in the Night over the past few days, I was captivated by Dylan’s 10-song, 35-minute excursion into the Great American Songbook.

Although each of these songs may have been sung by Sinatra at one point – and he’s listed as a co-writer on “I’m a Fool to Want You,” the opening number – and although the album title, Shadows in the Night, may be an allusion to “Strangers in the Night,” a Sinatra hit of the mid-1960s, I really don’t hear the album as a Sinatra tribute.

For one thing, Dylan does none of Sinatra’s major hits. There are no versions of “Strangers in the Night,” “New York, New York,” “It was a Very Good Year,” “One for My Baby,” “My Way,” etc. on this album. I looked through my own (limited) collection of Sinatra albums and not one of these songs is there. So while I am familiar with some of them from versions by other artists as disparate as Louis Armstrong and Rufus Wainwright – I recall 20-year-old Rufus singing a beautiful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” at his maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1994 – I do not have previous Sinatra associations with any of these songs.

For another, Dylan does not attempt to sound like Sinatra – how could he possibly? – and the arrangements, played by Dylan’s touring band with some occasional muted horns added to some songs, sound nothing like Sinatra’s typical big band or orchestral settings. There isn’t even a piano player on the album.

The Sinatra allusion aside, Shadows in the Night is a great title for a deeply intimate album that really should be listened to late at night. The songs are mature reflections sung quietly in Dylan’s ragged, yet compelling voice. He makes these songs his own in ways that are very different from how Sinatra – or other voices like Tony Bennett or Ella Fitzgerald – might have approached them.

The key song, for me anyway, is “Why Try to Change Me Now?” one of the more obscure songs I’d never heard before. Written by Joseph McCarthy Jr. and Cy Coleman, it’s lyrics could credibly have been written by Dylan about himself. “So, let people wonder, let ‘em laugh, let ‘em frown/You know I’ll love you till the moon’s upside down/Don’t you remember I was always your clown?/Why try to change me now?” he sings on top of a quietly lovely guitar-and-pedal-steel-based arrangement.

Among my other favorites are the weary-voiced renditions of “Autumn Leaves” and “That Lucky Old Sun,” both songs I’ve heard by many other artists, and Berlin’s “What I’ll Do,” a beautiful, lonely song.

Many of these are songs of regret – regrets borne of maturity and experience – and Dylan’s voice, ragged from the decades but somehow sweeter than it’s ever been, and as compelling as it’s ever been, draws me deeply into the songs. And I love the way he’s re-imagined the songs for subdued, arrangements built around guitars, pedal steel and bass.

This is not an album that Dylan – who revolutionized the art of songwriting in the 1960s when he was in his 20s – could have made back then. But it is something I’m glad he surprised us with in his 70s.

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--Mike Regenstreif