PERUGIA – In the summer in which Umbria Jazz celebrates the half century of its birth – which however does not coincide with fifty editions – Bob Dylan turns back the clock with a free mobile concert in which the public is invited to leave the mobile phones or, at least, to accept that they are switched off and sealed in envelopes at the entrance that prevent their use. Nothing to do, therefore, for selfie fanatics and for those who now experience music almost exclusively as an event to be shared in real time on social networks. «You have come to listen to me, not to see me», Dylan seems to want to say implicitly and if for a large part of his audience, having passed their fifties for quite some time, it is a healthy return to the past, for the younger experience is decidedly new and perhaps even alienating.
On the opening night of the Perugian event, even the two maxi screens on either side of the Santa Giuliana stage remain in the dark, those which generally allow those occupying the furthest rows to see the stage better and this too helps to give the evening an unprecedented retro flavor that fits perfectly with the lean scenography of the concert, the fifth occupied by a large red velvet drape, as in a slightly dated US club. Dylan will remain a vocal presence only for most of the evening, holed up behind the piano – he who is not a pianist, at least in the strict sense – placed across the stage and positioned behind the band, so as to make him even less visible.
At the heart of this tour, there are largely on the songs of Rough and Rowdy Ways, the last year of Ours, released three years ago now, no self-celebration and least of all the great titles of the past.
Above all, there is so much blues to frame a voice that over time – Dylan is eighty-two years old – becomes more and more of sandpaper assuming almost declamatory tones, like a sprechgesang steeped in country moods and forgetting those good rules of emission and intonation which in truth the Minnesota artist has never taken into high consideration throughout his career. And then there are the lyrics, the strong and incisive ones, in which it is still possible to identify the chromosomes of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads. In the long, intense Murder Most Foul Kennedy’s shadow appears, but the strongest verse of him is the one that reads “only dead men are free”: a few words that contain everything from the history of slavery to the assassination of George Floyd. The slow Black Rider, with its vaguely dark atmospheres, is a long reflection on the meaning of life and its end, because, Dylan recalls, in the end one sleeps «in the same bed with life and with death».
Reflections on the contemporary world in which Dylan revolves around the themes of creativity, the role reserved for art and its interpreters by contemporary society, while in Mother of Muses the invocation with an epic flavor turns its gaze to the great thinkers of the twentieth century in a singular cross between Homer, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. With him, a very solid band formed by Doug Lancio and Bob Britt on guitars, Donnie Herron on violin, guitar and pedal steel, Tony Garnier on bass and Jerry Pentecost on drums.
Two hours of music – introduced by the recording of a curious Beethovenian incipit – during which Dylan sings, strums the piano, plays a cymbal placed next to him. We will have to wait for the end of the evening to hear him on harmonica in Every Grain of Sand, taken from Shot of Love from 1981. And it will be an almost liberating sound, with the audience – until then in religious silence – finally standing up to applaud him and ready to run under the stage to be able to see it up close in the only moment in which, having abandoned the piano, it will allow itself to the full-length audience.
