5つ星のうち5.0Fantastic Collection of Music Selected by Bob Dylan
2009年10月21日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み
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While many of the songs on this CD set are not well known, they are really great. Bob Dylan has a radio show and these are some of the songs that he played. He knows his music and his choices are amazing. I really enjoyed this set of CDs.
5つ星のうち3.0Not bad for the price, but not great either
2009年5月25日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み
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(Note: there is no Dylan commentary on this set, which I knew going in.) I was rather disappointed by this one after the "Theme Time Radio Hour - With Your Host, Bob Dylan" set. This compilation has four CD's instead of two but the musical selection is half as interesting, being heavily slanted towards old blues, R&B, and many rather silly big-band-sounding songs with tritely "clever" lyrics, all from the 1930's, 40's and 50's. There isn't a single song from after 1957, which oddly enough is exactly 50 years before the release date of this set, indicating something weasely going on involving copyright and public domain.
The eight-page booklet uses fairly large type and has only six pages of sparse info, all of it sprinkled with minor grammar, punctuation and capitalization errors. I thought the British had higher academic standards than that - it was the most noticeably unprofessional writing I've ever seen in something that was actually printed up for sale to the public. (I'm sure there's worse out there - I just haven't run into it.)
My main complaint is that there were too many mediocre blues, R&B, and "Big Band"-era types of songs. There were a few gems scattered throughout, but I found myself experiencing a certain impatience with the "light" or supposedly humorous World War II-era types of novelty songs, the kind of songs they played between big hits of the day like "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," which ought to give you an idea of the kind of sound I'm talking about. Jaunty "swing" rhythms with a lot of horns and silly plays on words by guys trying to sound like "hip cats." The blues-type songs were similarly uninteresting, rarely showing real emotional depth but rather trying to be humorous about lame comic situations like mother-in-laws and cute underage girls. I would have liked more from the '60's and later, and some more examples of each of the following: "archaic" country and western stuff, weird old songs from the rural south, early reggae, obscure gospel reverberating like an angelic choir through a veil of scratches and hisses on the last known existing 45 of the recording, and cool stuff like that.
At least they had the reggae "Zombie Jamboree," sung by none other than the man who would eventually become the leader of The Nation of Islam, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan. But I didn't learn that from the eight-page booklet that came with this set - I learned it from the book that came with "Theme Time Radio Hour - With Your Host, Bob Dylan," which didn't even have that song in it!
However, all in all, considering the price and the number of songs included, you ought to be able to get your money's worth of enjoyment out of this collection if you like the types of older songs that are typically played on "Theme Time Radio Hour." Just be prepared to hit your "skip" button fairly often.
One more observation: I notice that several tracks start and/or end abruptly, with the fade-ins and fade-outs apparently truncated to save some space and time. Nothing ruinous, just noticeable enough to be mildly annoying.