Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl DVD Reviews

Kansas City Star
‘Astral Weeks: Live’ is in another zone altogether

I nearly bawled a couple of times while watching “Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film.”

This is one of the most astoundingly artful live performances I’ve ever seen. Plus, it celebrates an album overflowing with associations for boomers like yours truly.

Being a Van Morrison production, it’s also a tad eccentric. He never acknowledges the fans, never announces the song titles or introduces the members of his band.

We forgive him because Van Morrison is one of the great artists of the last 100 years, a singer and songwriter of such soaring imagination and aesthetic purity that I cannot name his equal.

Morrison’s 1968 album “Astral Weeks” was a landmark, simultaneously blending folk, jazz and blues in a song cycle about transcendence. It was like an encounter between William Blake and Big Joe Turner. It’s hard to believe Morrison was just 23 when he wrote and recorded it.

But while the critics raved, the public was indifferent. Though named one of the great albums of all time on numerous surveys, it took 30 years for it to go gold.

I remember being puzzled by the LP. A few years earlier Morrison had written the rock classic “Gloria” and the previous year had hit the charts with “Brown Eyed Girl.”

But “Astral Weeks” wasn’t anything like those tunes. The songs ebbed and flowed to gently lapping rhythms. Morrison’s lyrics were so cryptic that after three decades of listening I’m still not sure what they are about, yet they remain compelling. And despite the lack of obvious hooks, the songs take root deep in your consciousness.

Last November’s concert does not disappoint. Morrison and a dozen backup musicians (standouts are fiddler Tony Fitzgibbon and David Hayes, whose work on the upright bass gracefully propels each song) perform the cycle’s eight tunes.

Each number starts out sounding more or less like the recording but invariably segues into breathtaking improvisations. The driving force is Morrison’s slurred voice, more an instrument than a vehicle for lyrics. He’ll scat and repeat phrases until they take on hypnotic power.

Each song builds to a breathtaking climax, yet it’s not about volume. It’s about depth and feeling.

Yeah, you could say I liked it.
-ROBERT W. BUTLER

The Oklahoman
Van Morrison was 22 when he released "Astral Weeks,” his second and — up to then — most adventurous solo album. Fans who only knew him for the raw blues-rock of "Gloria” and "Here Comes the Night” and the free-wheeling R&B of "Brown-Eyed Girl” were caught off guard by the centerpiece "Cypress Avenue,” a delicate mix of chamber strings and harpsichord, jazzy acoustic bass and Morrison’s folky-bluesy vocal ruminations on his searching youth in Belfast. Once past the initial surprise, most fans and critics embraced the singer’s new eclecticism and painful honesty, which have remained hallmarks of his work ever since.

But with age, he’s become jazzier and brassier, often prone to extended self-indulgent excursions into meandering, scat-singing, repetitious improvisation. Such treatment works with his later material but tends to stretch many of these once emotionally fragile songs too thin, while rendering others almost unrecognizable. There’s no denying the stellar musicianship filling the Hollywood night on the blues-tinged "Slim Slow Slider” and the joyous, string-laced "Sweet Thing,” but when Morrison keeps repeating in his mush-mouthed mumble that "I believe I’ve transcended” in the long final minutes of the title song, one begins to wonder who he’s trying to convince. And his nearly unintelligible, hopped-up reading of "Cypress Avenue” wrings out all vestiges of its original youthful innocence. Purist admirers of the original work might want to pass on this jam-style update.
-Gene Triplett

Digital Entertainment News
Van Morrison has had a long career, with his second album Astral Weeks being hailed as a classic and one of the greatest ever recorded. The fact that it hasn’t sold phenomenally has not deterred the fanbase, critics, or even the artist himself. Now the whole album is presented in a live format 40 years after its initial release with Van Morrison: Astral Weeks – Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film.

Those looking for a faithful reproduction of the album will be disappointed as things are changed around a bit. The spirit of the album is wholly intact, and the changes made are not radical. The mellow songs are still mellow, the bass and piano are still prominent, but the arrangements are given an orchestral lean that wasn’t on the album. The order of the songs is also different as performed from the track listing of the album.

This is all so that Van Morrison can simply present the songs in a way that is interesting to both him and the audience. Retained is the jazz/folk feel that the original album has, but now simply produced live. The Hollywood Bowl is a great venue and helps to produce a great rich live sound. Very little post-production work is necessary, and we get, unlike many other concert recordings, essentially what the audience heard – and in this case saw.

I have two complaints about the DVD. The first is that the whole concert is not presented here. From what I understood, Van Morrison split the evening into two separate concerts, performing about an hour’s worth of hits, then performing the Astral Weeks numbers. We get two “bonus” songs, Common One and Gloria from the other section of the concert, but this is strictly the Astral Weeks album for the most part. The whole thing lasts just over an hour and 20 minutes, less than a full concert.

My other complaint is that the camera moves around too much. While this isn’t an action packed visual spectacle like modern concerts by current bands, mostly just the band standing with their instruments, it would be nice to be able to see the same image for more than 10 seconds at a time. It really wasn’t necessary to keep the handheld cameras in motion or needlessly keep cutting away and zooming in.

For fans of Van Morrison this is an absolute must-see, as it presents one of the musician’s seminal works in a new way that is interesting and engaging. This DVD also presents fans a way to be reintroduced to an early work of the singer that they may have overlooked.
-Daniel Pelfrey