Jewels And Binoculars: Floater
Roughly sixty percent of this album is magnificent, sublime, essential. The other forty percent is merely very good. If the idea of a jazz trio—reeds, bass, and drums—playing Dylan songs doesn’t sound all that promising to you, well, just give this a chance.
Jewels and Binoculars seems to be a sort of flag of convenience for Michael Moore and a couple of collaborators—no, not that Michael Moore, this one, a reed player who was unknown to me till Jesse Canterbury gave me this disk and its companion (about which more another time).
It may seem that Dylan’s comparatively simple songs would not provide much material for a jazz group to work on, and it’s true that for the most part these aren’t the sort of blowing sessions where the players get the tune out of the way asap and proceed to their real work. They are, rather, relaxed explorations of fairly straightforward but elementally appealing tunes and rhythms.
But not all are equally so. To explain the sixty-forty split: to my taste, five of the eleven tracks here are based on songs that aren’t, in themselves, all that great: “Things Have Changed” and “Floater,” for instance. There’s nothing at all wrong with the playing on these, but they’re limited by the raw material.
For me, the standout track is “Man in the Long Black Coat.” It’s one of Dylan’s very best songs and the treatment it gets here is wonderfully mysterious and brooding. It’s true of most of the tracks, but especially so of this one, that knowledge of the lyrics opens up a level of meaning that would be absent without it. Other favorites: “Masters of War,” “Farewell, Angelina,” and “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.” The last is one of Dylan’s better, if less well-known, tunes (assuming he wrote it and it’s not a borrowed folk melody, like “Masters of War,” which uses the English tune “Nottamun Town”). I wish it were long than its 2:10.
You can hear lengthy samples of three tracks here. Unfortunately two of them are the ones I mentioned above as being lesser. I suggest you try “Tears of Rage” first.
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