Paul Simon – In the Blue Light
Sony Music – 7 September 2018
Released to coincide with his final leg of his farewell tour, In the Blue Light finds Paul Simon revisiting songs that previously appeared on various albums between 1973 and 2011, bringing to them new arrangements and collaborations with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Bill Frisell and Steve Gadd.
It opens with its oldest song, One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor, taken from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and given a slightly slower jazz swing featuring Edie Brickell on finger-snaps with brass and some bluesy piano work from Joel Wendhardt.
Not following a chronological running order, it shifts to 2000 and You’re The One, Frisell on guitar and Gadd on drums for a sultrier Latin-laced blues groove to Love before falling back a decade to The Rhythm of the Saints and Can’t Run But, featuring New York chamber ensemble yMusic and based on the original arrangement but replacing the marimba with flute and trilling clarinet, the choppy rhythm giving way to a more nervy feel. Ten years earlier he’d released One-Trick Pony, and from that comes How The Heart Approaches What It Yearns, the original dreamy ambience supplanted by a late cellar jazz trio arrangement with Sullivan Fortner on what sounds like improvised piano, Nate Smith on drums and John Patitucci on bass, Marsalis adding to the mood with his trumpet curling through a nicotine haze.
It’s back to You’re The One, which is represented by no less than four tracks, for the skittering, loose-limbed New Orleans jazzy slip and slide of Pigs, Sheep and Wolves, playing down the original’s percussive core in favour of a big and brassy sound with Marsalis, who scored the arrangement, joined by clarinet, sax, trombone and tuba.
The album’s other two contributions come with The Teacher, retaining the semi-spoken delivery and the brass (replacing clarinet with and French horns Walter Blanding on sax) but now here with guitars courtesy of Odair and Sérgio Assad as opposed to the prominence of percussion. The fourth is Darling Lorraine, one of the more radical reworks, slowed down from the original’s loping rhythms to become an early hours ballad and its playing time extended by almost forty seconds with Frisell on guitar and further contributions from yMusic.
They also feature on Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War, originally from 1983’s Hearts and Bones, the woodwinds augmenting strings to imbue it with an even more achingly romantic glow.
It’s back to 1975 for the penultimate number, Some Folks’ Lives Roll Easy, the piano, featuring Sullivan Fortner, giving a more prominent jazzier improve role with Jack DeJohnette on itchy drums and Joe Lovano’s sax offering subtle shadings while. It ends with the most recent song, turning to 2011’s So Beautiful Or What and calling on Frisell, Fortner, Patitucci, LaPlante and yMusic for the early dawn ambience of Questions For The Angels, the arrangement largely faithful to the original, a song inspired by Simon regularly travelling across the Brooklyn Bridge during a month-long celebration of his music in 2008 and mentioning a billboard poster of Jay Z.
It’s an interesting collection of choices that omits anything from Graceland and the more familiar numbers from the album’s selected, such as, for example, 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover or The Late Great Johnny Ace. But as he explains in the video below he intentionally wanted to select lesser-known songs which didn’t get the attention he thought they deserved when first released. Regardless, it’s a stunning piece of work from an artist who may be putting his travelling shows away but, at 76, remains at the peak of his creative and musical powers.