Slate: Somehow it's become an inevitability, this business of reperforming your famous album. Lou Reed did it with Berlin, Brian Wilson did it with Pet Sounds, Roger Waters did it with Dark Side of the Moon, Arthur Lee (RIP) did it with Love's Forever Changes. Even Anthrax did it, with Among the Living. The years pass, a consensus is achieved, and then it's time: Assemble the band, hose off the magnum opus. There's a certain clinical rhythm to the thing, like getting a colonoscopy.
Still, let's not become inured to the oddness of it. Because it is odd. Totally un-rock 'n' roll, for starters, to be casting this fond retrospective gaze upon one's own work. (Would Iggy Pop do it, for God's sake? Oh—he already did.) And then rather risky too, by a paradox. Reperforming is a high-wire act. It's aesthetically fraught. What are you doing out there, exactly? You could be burnishing your masterpiece or flogging a dead horse. Or flogging your masterpiece. Or burnishing a dead horse.
In the case of Van Morrison and Astral Weeks—last year's reperformance of which has just been released as Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl—there would seem to be even more on the line than usual. Is there another album in the canon so haunted by the specter of maturity, so obsessed with a return to the lost springs of creation? "And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first/ And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst/ And I will never grow so old again." Morrison had read no William Blake when he delivered these lines (the poetical-mystical immersions of his middle period were still to come), which perhaps accounts for their authentically Blakeian atmosphere: Astral Weeks was this displaced 23-year-old Irishman's Songs Of Innocence & Experience.
It begins with a request to be born again and ends in a guitar-and-flute coughing fit as the dwindling junkie of "Slim Slow Slider" tips over on the streets of West London. The songs are strung taut between two worlds—or perhaps between one world and what it is dying to become. A man on Cyprus Avenue is watching schoolgirls through his windshield, frozen with yearning, "conquered in a car seat/ Nothing that I can do." Can lechery be made holy? Maybe if you use enough harpsichord. ... The album's opening couplet is immortal: "If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the viaducts of your dream ..." The first words, that cautious "ventured," suggest tentativeness, but the singer has already taken the plunge. Between innocence and experience, in a fast-moving associative blur, runs this bristling, scatty, half-tortured voice that will never sound the same again.
Against the stream of time, or in its slipstream to be precise, Van Morrison in 1968 goes into a New York studio. He finds a group of crack session men, the cream of the contemporary jazz scene, assembled there by producer Lew Merenstein. Bassist Richard Davis has played with Eric Dolphy and Ahmad Jamal; drummer Connie Kay is from the Modern Jazz Quartet; Jay Berliner, on guitar, is a Mingus man. Rather an unrock crew for a session with Van Morrison, performer of the bouncy "Brown-Eyed Girl" and recent graduate from mad-dog beat combo Them. But then, Van, as Merenstein has intuited, is about to become an unrock star. His new songs are weird—straggling, open-ended raptures, almost gibberish some of them, about 14-year-old girls and railroad bridges in Belfast. In the studio, ecstasy happens: Davis and Kay set up a cross-flutter of bass and cymbal, a kind of hallucinated skiffle, that will become the nervous system of Astral Weeks. One imagines Van and the band in an inspired folk-bop huddle, eye to eye, melding minds at high temperatures, but apparently not. Studio walls separate them, as well as some never-explained reluctance on the part of the singer to offer any direction at all to his musicians: Most accounts have Van sealed off, raving privately in his recording booth while the unflappable jazzers outside just do it.
Fast forward 40 years, and Van is no longer a minstrel on fire but a "legendary figure," girded with age and thicker about the larynx, about to reperform his most renowned work. His career has been restless and refractory, with plenty of blinding music in it but nothing, as even his fiercest partisan will admit, to compare to Astral Weeks. He simply never goes there again, with the result that the album assumes in his discography the character of something almost aberrant, a freak-out or visitation. In its wake, he'll become a seeker, exploring theosophy, poetry, the New Age—even Scientology, briefly. He'll rumble about Blake and Yeats and Madame Blavatsky for album after album, but Astral Weeks, in which his pet word "mystic" isn't used once, remains his most purely mystical statement. Unrepeatable, in other words.
And yet here he is in November 2008, repeating it—sort of. It must be said that the first 10 minutes of Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl are not easy to enjoy. The music is a fine sparkling shuffle, but the singer sounds truculent, dissociated, puddinglike. "From the far side of the ocean/ If I put the wheels in motion ..." There's a technical interest, perhaps, in hearing lines as beautiful as these rephrased as lounge-bar throwaways. And some small satirical gratification to be had from Van's growling of "I believe I've transcended/ I believe I've tran-scen-ded ..." when he has plainly done no such thing. But these are jaundiced pleasures, and by the middle of "Beside You" the possibility has presented itself that the whole affair might be an amazing Morrisonian debacle, like one of those shows where he ends up swearing at everybody.
As his tubes warm up, though, and as he works his changes upon the words "I just don't know what to do/ I just don't know what to do," "Slim Slow Slider" becomes rather gorgeous. When Patti Smith reperformed Horses in London in 2005 she began (of course) with "Gloria," her visionary expansion of the 1964 Them hit, her strange tribute to Van. She was fiery-voiced and potent, and somewhat unexpectedly she took the roof off. Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl is less robust than that. The spirit shyly descends, then gives a puff on its boosters and is away again. Here's why we love Astral Weeks, the real one: because life runs backward, in some way. The original gift is squandered, the native knowledge mislaid, and half an existence spent scrambling to reclaim what once seemed our birthright. Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl is by no means a great album. Here and there it even stinks. But in the annals of reperformance, it's already a classic—perhaps the most poignant dialogue yet recorded between time, mean old don't-give-a-shit time, and the irretrievable moment.
-James Parker
The Sun:VAN MORRISON - Astral Weeks: Live At The Hollywood Bowl
WITH his fedora and shades, he is every inch Mr Inscrutable.
When he plays live, you’re never quite sure which Van Morrison is going to turn up.
He’s rather like my football team, Norwich City, capable of a woeful defeat at home to rock-bottom Charlton or a heroic 3-3 draw at runaway leaders Wolves.
So his decision to reinterpret his greatest album, 1968’s Astral Weeks, with band and orchestra at The Hollywood Bowl left me with mixed feelings.
There’s no way he could surpass the fluid, mystical majesty of the original.
And when I discovered he only did one rehearsal, I thought, “surely not?” He couldn’t possibly pull it off.
Then again (without wishing to sound too gushing), I was aware that Van Morrison is one of contemporary music’s true greats: The Belfast Cowboy, the creator of Celtic soul.
So, what of the album?
Quite simply, it’s stunning. He doesn’t try to match the original. He doesn’t try or can’t hit some of the high notes.
But these loose, improvised, inspired readings circle the old songs with due reverence while heading into new realms of emotion and connection. The older, wiser Van Morrison is discovering meanings and moods quite different to those of the long-haired 23-year-old of ’68.
As the opening title track ebbs and flows to a conclusion, he repeats “I Believe I’ve Transcended” and it’s not hard to believe him.
The remaining tracks roll effortlessly along on the crest of waves of strings and horns and acoustic guitars, THAT voice at its soulful best.
He lets songs like Beside You, Sweet Thing and Madame George go on new journeys without pre-ordained ideas about their destinations.
And Slim Slow Slider and Cyprus Avenue are given lyrical codas that add rather than detract.
Morrison says: “The Hollywood Bowl concerts gave me a welcome opportunity to perform these songs the way I originally intended them to be.
“There are certain dynamics you can get in live recordings that you can’t get in the studio.
“The songs are timeless and as fresh as the day they were written, actually even more so.
“It’s got it all, jazz, blues, folk, classic, you name it.”
-SIMON COSYNS
Democrat & Chronicle: Astral Weeks remains my favorite album of all time, despite the fact that I still have no idea what it's about. Love through the eyes of a tortured young man, I suppose. Morrison is no longer a young man. He was 63 when he recorded this live version last year on Astral Weeks' 40th birthday. But when, in "Slim Slow Slider," he sees the woman he longs for with another man and slowly moans, "I don't know what to do," I still believe him. The songs are in a different order now, with two additional tracks from deep in his career, "The Lion Speaks" and "Summertime in England." And different instruments. Morrison pauses to riff over certain lines, stutters "my tongue gets tied every, every, every time I try to speak." It will be in the stores on Feb. 10.
-Jeff Spevak
Huffington Post: When Van Morrison's essential work, Astral Weeks, hit the stores in 1968, it instantly was revered by critics and musicians around the world. It influenced future cultural icons such as Bono and especially, Bruce Springsteen, whose "Incident on 57th Street," "New York City Serenade," and virtually all of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. sounded like unintended tributes to the Celtic rocker. Named Rolling Stone's nineteenth best album of all time in 2003, it was Morrison's first long player for Warner Bros. Records, and his second solo album post his tenure with the rock group Them (his first being T.B. Sheets for Bang Records). Even though the LP's most "commercial" recording, "Sweet Thing," initially was perceived as its focus track, Astral Weeks featured no hit singles, sales were not impressive (it finally having turned "gold" by 2001), and to new listeners raised on pop radio, it was a challenging amalgam of folky-blues, jazz, northern soul, and singer-songwriter-styled lyrics. But historically, the LP was released at just the right time since, like the substances that supposedly were expanding the minds of a generation, this album did the same.
Apparently, expansion was on Morrison's mind during the landmark album's creative process that reached beyond mundane arrangements and traditional recording routines. Lots of musical freedom was encouraged during the sessions that, basically, were well-mapped jams. In one of his 2008 interviews, the artist recalled that Astral Weeks' material was "from another sort of place" (fyi, his first take on "Madame George" was included on T.B. Sheets). He revealed how the album's "poetry and mythical musings" sprung from his imagination in a unique way, saying, "The songs were somewhat channeled works...that is why I called it 'Astral Weeks,'"--its title an obvious shoutout to the astral plane. As far as it having been one of the great "concept" albums, Astral Weeks was considered one, though it really shouldn't have been stereotyped as merely that. Regardless of the original LP's side splits as "In The Beginning" and "Afterwards" (probably the result of vinyl's timing issues), it otherwise ignored symmetry and any intentional travel from points "a" to "z" as its musical journeys and stream of consciousness lyrics rejected normal structure. Characters, subject matter, lovers, and landscapes migrated throughout the work, often, at the most random of moments, in order to prove an emotional, not intellectual point. Springsteen took a fraction of this approach and applied it to his first two albums, amazing us in the process. However, Morrison remains the master of his transcendental craft to this day, using it most effectively during his live performances.
That brings us to Morrison's early November 2008 concerts featuring his new take on that seminal album. The CD Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl documents his album's initial vision with a slight makeover, it now taking creative license by extending song titles and tweaking the original sequence. (Morrison felt some sequence tweaks, such as concluding with "Madame George," were now more appropriate.) Originally written and sung from a young man's more innocent perspective, Astral Weeks' live revisit mostly benefits from the forty years of character lines and some graying that Morrison's reinterpretation now brings to it. From the moment he sings the title track's lyrics, "To lay me down, in silence easy, to be born again," you get the feeling it's not just the singer's implied transformation that's being announced, but Astral Weeks itself.
Through it all, Morrison is where he wants to be, onstage and in Heaven, singing, playing sax, guitar, and harmonica. The band's camaraderie is communicated musically, especially between Morrison and Astral's original guitarist, Jay Berliner. There are many featured solos and licks, and there's even some playful overacting, such as on "Cyprus Avenue"'s lines, "...and my t-t-t-t-tongue gets tied every time I try to s-s-s-s-speak." Morrison's new sequence works just fine, like how "Sweet Thing" leads into "The Way Young Lovers Do" ("Moondance"'s wilder cousin). His adding the bonus tracks "Listen to the Lion" from St. Dominic's Preview, and "Common One" (added from the show's earlier non-Astral set) don't detract, but instead, strangely feel like appropriate epilogues. In "...Lion," Morrison pumps his harp for a primal sound that's both humorous and masculine, and "Common..." with its echoed vocal replies, almost serves as the encore and one last reminder that this singer's got chops.
Almost as important as the performances, there is a real intimacy heard on this CD, perhaps from its players being recorded amidst tightly compacted stage gear and stacked instruments, giving it an old time Bleecker Street music shop vibe. And with a basic reverence for the original record, this live Astral's arrangements allow for musicians to add new layers of strata though jams, while acknowledging forty years has passed since the original was slated. Reportedly, Van Morrison wasn't aware of the anniversary when he thought up the live version, and in an interview with entertainment guru, David Wild, he said, "I had always wanted to do these songs live with orchestration. I thought I should probably get to it now--it's time."
-Mike Ragogna
Caught In The Carousel: The Beatles said "It was thirty years ago today" and that's a helluva long time, but Astral Weeks was recorded exactly forty years before the day they re-recorded it live at the Hollywood Bowl and for those of you quivering under your beds, let me just say that first of all, yes, it is a long fucking time, but fear not: Van, at 63, is in good form, good as ever, and still fearlessly delivering the goods. He's backed by forty musicians (get it...forty?), many of who played on the original (yup). The instrumentation is lush, naturally, lots of cool guitars and pretty licks and flutes, violins and cellos (and after only one rehearsal...holy shit) but the thing that struck me the most while listening to this is that it appears that Van is unchanged; he's still that guy that who can move you in a phrase. "Slim Slow Slider" is especially poignant, more so than on the LP. "The Way That Young Lovers Do," my favorite on the original, is spectacular, "Cypress Avenue" and "Madame George," too. Listening to this CD is like opening your screen door at the end of a hot summer's day and seeing a long lost pal standing there, ready to go over old times with you like they just happened yesterday. Bless the Belfast Cowboy. He's ornery as hell but he did a great job raising us. Check out my review of the original Astral Weeks at www.vinylprincess.blogspot.com
—The Vinyl Princess
Hippies Are Dead: Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is viewed by many critics to be his defining artistic achievement. Largely forgotten at the time due to its inaccessibility and abstract nature, it has slowly become the dark horse of Morrison's catalog: worshiped by those in the know, and completely ignored by the disciples of Morrison's greatest hits. As such, the album has languished in its live format for many years. Van presumably wanted to cater his fans, and Astral Weeks simply was not at the top of most of those fans' lists. So it came as no surprise that when Morrison announced he would be playing the album in full at the Hollywood Bowl, there was a collective sigh of musical orgasm from critics the world over.
To be frank, the original Astral Weeks has always proved a tad elusive for us here at HAD. The age of the tapes serves to make them reasonably muddy, and the ethereal, "jammy" feel of the album simply seemed to lose something in the recording. We could hear that there was something special there, but the record simply never really reached out and grabbed us. Given that, we were of two minds with regard to Morrison's announcement: On the one hand, it might serve to enlighten us and allow us to finally "get" Astral Weeks. We're always partial to live recordings, and modern recording technology couldn't hurt things either. On the other hand, it had the potential to further confound us amidst further applause of genius or even be a complete artistic disaster.
Thankfully, the upcoming Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl puts us firmly in the former category. The record is a vital, crystal clear, stunningly executed live document of Morrison's 1968 album. Everything about the record is so right that it's hard to know exactly where to begin. Most obvious is Morrison himself: he simply delivers a vocal performance that completely transcends his 63 years. His voice is in top form, with a touch more of baritone, and he makes his way through the songs with ease. Backing up Morrison is the guitarist from the original sessions, Jay Berliner. Berliner serves not only to give the recording some vintage credibility, but his distinctive playing slowly reveals itself as one of the stalwarts of the original record. These two, combined with a stellar backing band, serve to lay the foundation for an amazing night.
Still, solid musicians a great live record do not necessarily make. There are so many more aspects to performance and recording that have to fit the bill and fall in to place to allow for a live record to be truly great. Surprisingly, Morrison apparently only had one rehearsal before these shows, and allowed no overdubs in post production. While this may seem to be a bit optimistic, it serves the record extremely well. The feel of the album has a truly live character: the audience is ever present in the background, and the band has a loping unity that truly brings home the feel of collaboration. No doubt if one had been sitting in the studio during the original recording sessions, it might have felt something like this.
For an endeavor that had so much potential for pitfalls, Astral Weeks Live At Hollywood Bowl simply managed to sail right past all of them. The music is immaculate, the performances exceptional, and the reality of the performance jumps right out of the speakers. The album is unquestionably a must-have, for both fans and skeptics of the record. For those who already love it, it's a no-brainer. Morrison's performance is a landmark event, and he pulls it off flawlessly. For those who haven't "found" the record, its equally as crucial. The record brings the songs to life in a new light, and does a great deal to illustrate what it is that makes the original such a landmark.
At the end of the day, Morrison has managed to successfully pull off something of a "reunion" with his former self, reaching back into his catalogue and pulling out its crown jewel for all to see. It should be a lesson to his peers, and even those younger, who are considering reunions of their own: the bar has been set, and if you can't do it this well, you might really want to reconsider doing it at all.
Astral Weeks Live At Hollywood Bowl is released on February 10th, 2009 on Morrison's own Listen To The Lion records.
Chicago Tribune: Van Morrison revisits his masterpiece, 'Astral Weeks'
On one evening last year, Van Morrison finally got around to revisiting the album that many consider his masterpiece, “Astral Weeks.”
On Tuesday, a recording of that performance --- “Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl” (Listen to the Lion/EMI) --- will be released. It presents a singer who sounds more engaged, more passionate than he has been about anything in years.
No work in Morrison’s canon --- or in the rock lexicon, for that matter --- sounds quite like “Astral Weeks.” Forty-one years after its release it still occupies its own world. It was never meant to be a rock album. Nor is it quite jazz either, even though a bunch of accomplished jazz musicians play on it. It’s not readily identifiable as the blues and R&B that Morrison revered as a youth. It’s steeped in the spirit of Irish poetry, but more in how it is sung rather than in how the words scan or what they mean.
The album produced no radio hits to rival Morrison’s best known songs, such as “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Domino,” “Wild Night” and “Moondance.” And it has been outsold by several Morrison albums. But it has never gone out of print, and it continues to hold an almost sanctified place in the history of popular music. It consistently appears on lists extolling the top albums of all time and it has been dissected and praised by discerning music listeners for decades. More significantly, it is an album that Morrison himself has never topped.
The original studio album arrived at a crucial time in Morrison’s transformation from the R&B shouter who fronted the Irish garage-rock band Them to the solo artist who chased his muse “into the mystic” and defined Celtic soul.
Morrison had established his solo career in 1967 with “Brown Eyed Girl,” but he couldn’t have been more discouraged. He had a vision for how he wanted his music recorded, and to his ears, producer Bert Berns had sabotaged it with pop sugarcoating.
Soon after, the Irish singer was banging around Boston, testing new songs in coffeehouses with an acoustic trio. He was moving toward a more meditative sound outside the boundaries of rock, R&B and blues, though it was informed by all of those genres. Most producers he auditioned for didn’t get it, but one did: Lewis Merenstein, a New York studio veteran whose credits would include the Mamas and Papas, Curtis Mayfield, John Cale, Miriam Makeba and Gladys Knight.
In Morrison’s idiosyncratic voice, Merenstein heard echoes of jazz vocalese, the style of vocal improvisation briefly popular in the early ‘50s. He hired jazz musicians for a recording session in New York, naming the bassist Richard Davis as session leader. Davis in turn recruited Jay Berliner, a veteran of Charles Mingus’ bands, to play guitar, and the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Connie Kay to play drums. The session also would include strings, horns, keyboards and flute.
Morrison’s nonlinear songs lent themselves to a more open-ended interpretation. In these songs, his native Belfast figures prominently, but more as a state of mind than a geographical location. In these songs, Belfast becomes a place where time ceases to matter and childhood memories, adolescent passions and adult anxieties merge in a free zone of pure feeling. Cypress Avenue, the Belfast street where the rich folks lived, would become a lyrical metaphor for all that was out of reach for young Van.
Morrison was only 23 years old when the album was completed, but the songs on “Astral Weeks” showed the perspective of a much older man.
The album opens with the wondrous invitation of the title song to “be born again,” in a place “between the viaducts of your dreams.” The extraordinary sound of Richard Davis’ upright bass functions as a second voice, a foil for Morrison’s mercurial musings. The song unfolds and then gently recedes over seven minutes, with strings trembling like leaves in a sun-kissed breeze, and Morrison’s voice drifting away to a whisper. He is a “stranger in this world,” and his true home is “in another time, in another place.”
The album tells the story of that search for home by focusing on commonplace details. Morrison repeats phrases and words until they become incantations. Freed from the confines of pop structure and chord changes, he bends and twists lyrics in search of every possible nuance until he liberates them from literal meaning. “You breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out,” he chants on “Beside You.” “Then you’re high, on your high-flying cloud.”
Morrison doesn’t belong to the world he describes because he feels too much; implied is the notion that life is only worth living in these emotional extremes, from the reverie of “The Way That Young Lovers Do” to the torment of “Cypress Avenue.” The images conjured in these whirls of madness and ecstasy are all the more powerful because they’re uncensored. His hometown street of elusive dreams becomes the setting for a tale of illicit obsession. Morrison pines for a 14-year-old girl in “Cypress Avenue,” and over stately harpsichord, his self-denial turns into physical pain.
Yet there is still a reward in feeling so deeply about anything. What is most unbearable is the impermanence of it all. The specter of loneliness haunts Morrison throughout “Astral Weeks,” and as the album winds down it overwhelms him. “Madame George” describes the life of an aging, kind-hearted drag queen who throws parties for “the little boys comin’ round,” only to be abandoned by them again when the music fades, the booze runs out and the dancing stops. Amid these decadent liaisons, Morrison sees only the sadness of another human being, and he is moved to tears even as makes his exit. The music is more of a tone poem than a song, a gentle weave of melancholy violin, flute and guitar with Davis wielding his bass like a beacon in the gloaming.
The light is extinguished for good on the closing “Slim Slow Slider.” Death closes in and Davis’ unflappable bass suddenly turns agitated as Morrison mutters the album’s epitaph. And then it’s done, an abrupt “Sopranos”-like shift to inky black silence.
When Morrison performed “Astral Weeks” at the Hollywood Bowl last year, he tinkered with the sequencing so that “Slim Slow Rider” arrived in the middle of the set, rather than the end. And he reshaped many of the songs, adding new codas, playing with vocal phrasing, and expanding the orchestration. It is a different work but no less emotionally devastating. Morrison’s invocation to “get on the train” in “Madame George” evokes Curtis Mayfield’s civil-rights anthem “People Get Ready.” Like the soul classic, “Madame George” becomes a hymn to transcendence, an invitation to the better world Morrison describes in the title song --- one that may exist only in our imagination.
-Greg Kot
The Independent: It's taken only four decades, but fans finally get the opportunity to hear what Astral Weeks, that most singular, haunting and enchanted of albums, sounds like in concert.
Through all five of Van Morrison's previous live albums, only "Cyprus Avenue" has been featured, leaving the milestone album's extraordinary semi-improvised folk-jazz excursions seeming like a blind alley, upon which the singer had long since turned his back. This recording, featuring a string section alongside subtle jazz accompanists, suggests the reluctance may have been due more to logistical difficulties in realising the songs adequately. But it's been worth the wait: the more mature aspect now accorded these youthful, impressionistic songs works to their advantage, the stream-of-consciousness imagery coalescing like fragmentary autumnal memories of a sylvan spring. Their loose structures expand easily to accommodate Morrison's further vocal extemporisations and the band's instrumental breaks. The track which perhaps profits most in its new incarnation is "Ballerina", which here acquires a new poise and relaxed grace commensurate with its metaphor, not least in the violin and acoustic guitar breaks. A triumph, revisited.
Pick of the album:'Ballerina', 'Sweet Thing', 'The Way Young Lovers Do', 'Madame George', 'Beside You'
-Andy Gill
UK Telegraph: In a cascade of flowing instrumentation, a swollen tide of tumbling bass and rising flute, washing around a lone, ululating voice, Van Morrison ventures once more into the slipstream, the 62-year-old Belfast singer delightedly repeating the phrase, "to be born again", as if he really has been. It is the extraordinary opening track for his new album, Astral Weeks.
The title will already be familiar to music fans. Astral Weeks was the legendary 1968 album that established Morrison's reputation, after pop hits with Northern Irish band Them. Although not a big seller at the time, it has come to be regarded as a classic in rock's canon, regularly named among the greatest albums ever made. Forty years on, Morrison has remade it as a live album, recorded with a 14-piece band over two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl last November.
The original is an album of mysteries, as much, one suspects, to its maker as its listeners. Raw and in-the-moment, it blends jazz, blues, soul and folk into an amorphous singer-songwriter extemporisation. The young, sharply tenor-voiced Morrison pulls together snatches of vivid imagery into a richly melancholic yet strangely uplifting song sequence. It is beautiful and strange.
In dispute with his American label, Morrison was in dire financial straits when Warner Brothers bought out his contract. Astral Weeks was recorded in just three live sessions with a handful of New York jazz musicians. What happened in the studio was an improvised collision of cultures, channelled through a young genius trying to convey the music he heard in his head.
Despite poor sales, it was influential among critics, helping shape the singer-songwriting boom of the Seventies.
Yet Morrison has often belittled it, claiming he didn't have the budget to create the fully orchestrated work he envisioned. In an interview in Uncut magazine in 2005, Morrison disparaged producer Lewis Merenstein and his fellow musicians. "If you listen to the record closely enough, they're out of sync a lot of the time, or sometimes they're not sure where they're going next. Those guys were just winging it. There was no rapport."
Morrison is a notoriously unpredictable and belligerent interview subject. A recurring theme is irritation at being viewed as some kind of heritage act. On Radio 4's Today programme last year, he accused the music business of being obsessed with the past. "It's like no one has moved on. The marketplace is going backwards." Which makes his decision to revisit Astral Weeks all the more curious.
What he has done, I suspect, is remake it the way he always imagined it. The running order is slightly different and the band (which includes only one original member) much larger. Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl is looser, jazzier, warmer, fuller. It is still spontaneous, the band having only had one rehearsal, yet there is an assuredness in working from a solid template. Morrison's voice has changed, descending into a more baritone range, but his singing is, if anything, even more extraordinary.
Playful and celebratory, the live version doesn't have the undercurrent of melancholy, sacrificing one of the most magical ingredients of the original. Only on Slim Slow Slider, which grapples with the death of a loved one, does his age add emotional weight. But Morrison fills those emotional spaces with other things, a mature musical talent at the height of his powers, leading an exceptional band on a journey to complete self expression. Astral Weeks Live is no slavish recreation but a new interpretation. Now there are two versions of the same piece of music, each distinct. "I believe I've transcended," he starts to sing during the title track. And we believe him too.
-Neil McCormick
Times Online: It might be naive to imagine that financial expediency (note how it’s on his own label) didn’t play a part in prompting Van Morrison to recreate Astral Weeks at last year’s Hollywood Bowl show.
However great the legacy of the legendary 1968 album, Morrison has never let it be forgotten that it barely paid his heating bills at the time. Along the way, though, he clearly reconnected with the feverish reverie that spawned these songs. If it was tempting fate to go back at all, sourcing the same jazz sessioneers – barely known to Morrison at the time, or indeed after – seems positively foolhardy. And yet, on Sweet Thing, somewhere between the lugubrious thump of Richard Davis’s bass and the euphoric strum of Morrison’s guitar, the magic that spawned these songs in the first place billows off the speakers like seaspray.
Beautifully recorded, The Way Young Lovers Do preserves the spark of new love long enough for us to marvel at its constituents, while on the title track Morrison exclaims: “I believe I’ve transcended.” Hear and believe it.
-Pete Paphides
Entertainment Weekly: This re-creation of Van Morrison's 1968 classic, recorded in November, finds Van's voice deeper and throatier, but no less prone to glossolalia and playful stuttering. The strings, flute, etc., are all present on Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl, albeit mixed more subtly into the acoustic-jam arrangements than on the original LP. All this deceptively timeless fluidity induces a wonderful mystic fog that might make you forget whether you're honoring a 40th, 5th, or 100th anniversary. A–
-Chris Willman
Here is Anthony's review:
Comfortable Numb - This was a great version of the Pink Floyd song. He introduced it by saying he didn’t write it, but they asked him to sing it for a movie, so he did.
It was a large band. Two back up singers, a three-piece string section plus an incredible violinist (his solos were some of the highlights of the sets), a percussionist, a drummer, stand-up acoustic bass player, an organ & piano player who also filled in on trumpet (it might have been Georgie Fame), the sax/flute player, an acoustic guitar player who sat in a chair throughout the show (Jay Berliner), and two additional guitar players. The band was all configured in close proximity to Van, and the bass player and Jay Berliner were actually facing Van instead of the audience. For that matter, all the musicians were watching Van, so they could catch any of his hand signals.
