2023-07-02 12:22:38
Bob Dylan, 82, delivered a “classic” concert on Saturday evening in Montreux which rather pleasantly surprised the public and delighted its aficionados. In front of 1,500 spectators, he performed songs from his latest album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways”, as well as older songs from his repertoire.
8:31 p.m., six men dressed in black go up on stage at Stravinsky. Among them, Bob Dylan settles down at the piano, a place he will never leave throughout the evening.
The five other musicians position themselves all around him, they surround the boss in a tight formation. The piano, precisely, is not installed laterally as is the custom. It points towards the room and the keyboard is oriented towards the back of the stage, which creates a kind of rampart between Dylan and the public.
Welded group
For an hour and almost forty-five minutes, we will listen and observe this close-knit, concentrated group, led by a boss who does not want to be seen. He conceals himself as he conceals his songs by transforming them, dismantling them to reconstruct them each evening. We have known for a long time that Bob Dylan is constantly reinventing his repertoire, we know that we have every chance of losing our bearings, that his songs will be unrecognizable.
On this tour, he adds an additional level of requirement: he does not play any of his classics, any of his popular anthems. He prefers to build a treasure hunt that takes us into the lesser-known twists and turns of his sprawling discography. Of all those he performed that evening in Montreux, the best known (“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”) was actually popularized by the Englishman Robert Palmer.
We also note the very recent and undoubtedly autobiographical “I Contain Multitudes”, released in 2020 on an album which gives its title to this tour: “Rough And Rowdy Ways”. The expression is difficult to translate, it is regarding roughness and a feisty mood.
If Dylan has always fought, it’s once morest the predictable and the expected. Obviously, if we are not prepared for it, we can feel destabilized, disappointed or even incredulous. However, Bob Dylan’s concerts are built like dialogues between him and his audience, which he asks each evening to accompany him along a hiking trail made of archeology, irony (we heard a few winks eye in his piano playing), puzzles and a certain taste for risk.
Directory that makes fun of time
One might fear the incomprehension of an uninformed public but the applause let it be understood that there was no misunderstanding. This Saturday evening, we listened to a group of very high rank and a singer always very subtle put themselves at the service of a repertoire that makes fun of time and songs that are reborn every evening.
After an hour and a quarter of a truly feisty blues, the six men left their instruments, lined up at the edge of the stage for the time to cast a look that seemed to say “this is what we came to tell you”, then went left without a word.
Yann Zitouni/olhor
1688302744
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