29-Sep-09 Chicago Theatre, Chicago Concert Review
Chicago Tribune
“Astral Weeks,” a 1968 album that produced not a single hit but remains one of the most revered works of the rock era, was the main course at Van Morrison’s sold-out concert Tuesday at the Chicago Theatre.

Its eight songs were performed in slightly reshuffled order from the original album, presumably so Morrison could present the album in definitive form. His nine-piece band was designed to evoke the flavor of the original, with its mix of acoustic instrumentation, chamber-pop orchestration and agile, jazz-flavored interplay. At the center of it all was the Irish soul singer in fedora and shades. As is his habit, he didn’t say anything to his audience that wasn’t already in his music.

He played with a mixture of resolve and distraction, throwing himself into some songs and tossing off others, notably the obligatory hits “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Have I Told You Lately.”

The singer and his musicians eased into the concert a bit uneasily, with muted versions of relative obscurities such as “Northern Muse (Solid Ground)” and “Fair Play.” The band was best when Morrison was setting the tempo on acoustic guitar, and he found a rich vein of country-soul that morphed into brass-fueled R&B in “Little Village,” shouting off the microphone and soloing on his saxophone. Soon after he delivered an incantatory version of “In the Garden,” working subtle variations barely above a whisper into a song like a prayer.

If the set so far had been a bit relaxed, the start of “Astral Weeks” in the show’s second half found the musicians leaning into their instruments, visibly rising to the challenge.

The album is less a narrative then an exploration of emotional extremes, the human experience laid out in childhood reveries and adult anxieties, infatuation and sadness, desire and death. To reflect that bittersweet volatility, the music ebbed and flowed, the upright bass of David Hayes surging to the front of the mix and then receding, Jay Berliner’s guitar and Tony Fitzgibbon’s fiddle answering each other like human voices, while Morrison turned his voice into a saxophone, the way he reshaped syllables and phrases.

Berliner, the lone musician on stage who also played on the original “Astral Weeks” sessions, embroidered every vocal phrase on the brilliant title song, and the three-piece string section played a slow, shivering fade – the night’s single most enduring moment.

“Turn me up!” Morrison yelled to his sound engineer as he and Berliner traded lines in “Beside You.” Then came the dark “Slim Slow Slider,” which ended the original album on a devastating note, its anguish now punctuated by Morrison’s slashing rhythm guitar.

“Cypress Avenue” couched its illicit longing in stately harpsichord. “The Way Young Lovers Do” swung ebulliently. And the elegiac “Madame George” brought the song cycle to a close with an invitation to leave this world – presumably for a better place. “Get on this train,” Morrison chanted as if in a church, conjuring images of Curtis Mayfield’s civil-rights anthem “People Get Ready.”

After that, a mini-medley of the singer’s garage-rock classics with Them, “Mystic Eyes” and Gloria,” felt anti-climactic. Four decades after it was recorded, “Astral Weeks” remains a tough act to follow.
-Greg Kot

Setlist
Northern Muse (Solid Ground)
Brown Eyed Girl
Fair Play
Foreign Window
The Mystery
Little Village
Have I Told You Lately
In the Garden
Astral Weeks
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing
Cypress Avenue
The Way Young Lovers Do
Ballerina
Madame George
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

Big Hand For The Band
Paul Moran
Tony Fitzgibbon
David Hayes
Richie Buckley
Jay Berliner
Bobby Ruggiero

26-Sep-09 Wells Fargo Theater, Denver Concert Review
Denver Post
Van Morrison was armed well at his Denver concert on Saturday night.

Wearing his ever-present sunglasses, suit and fedora, Morrison switched between a white acoustic guitar and a harmonica, an electric guitar and an alto saxophone during his 90-minute, no-nonsense set at the Wells Fargo Theatre on Saturday.

The time spent with Morrison was hardly as memorable as the artist’s Red Rocks show a few summers back, but longtime fans were pleased as Morrison kicked off the evening (at 8 p.m. sharp, no less) with “Northern Muse (Solid Ground),” “This Love of Mine” and “Fair Play.”

The singer-songwriter catered his performance to the fans who have faithfully followed his music beyond “Brown Eyed Girl,” the fans who enjoy/revel in elongated takes – accented by multiple solos – of “Foreign Window” and “The Mystery.” I’ll admit that I’m not that fan, but still Morrison’s top-notch six-piece band made for an entertaining evening.

The gentleman on the flute/tenor sax/bari sax was a master player who was versatile enough to handle all three of those instruments with aplomb, and the seated acoustic guitarist was a madman who slayed each of his solos and accented Morrison’s playing smartly, ably.

Speaking of the solos, the best part of the show came watching Morrison dole out the solos – with a head-nod here and a finger-point there. You could tell some of it was impromptu, as Morrison would sometimes bark at an unprepared player – the flutist/sax player and the pianist/trumpeter – to pick up his other instrument and join him on an improvisation.

Morrison’s shows are always studies in dynamics, and the loud-soft-loud of his songs is one of his trademarks that, like his hat and glasses, has become a cliché. But Morrison’s cloud-lifted, otherworldly voice never gets old.


That said, Saturday’s setlist, which also included “Queen of the Slipstream,” “All In the Game” and a gorgeous “In the Garden,” wasn’t ideal. It’s not like anybody who paid between $90 and $350 to see Morrison expected to hear “Brown Eyed Girl,” but he could have thrown a couple more familiar bones.

He played fewer than 15 songs, and of those, only two or three were familiar hits – including “Moondance” and the Them track “Gloria.” And of those, Moondance cruised on a sweet backbeat while “Gloria” sounded like a dated anachronism – a shame indeed because it’s one of the strongest songs he’s written to date.
-Ricardo Baca

Here's Rick's review:
OK, so one night after Vegas, with an 8:00 start time instead of 7:00 in a city in which he has usually punched the clock, I was expecting Van to simply mail in tonight's set. What I didn't expect, and what we got, was a Van fan's wet dream. I mean, I suppose it could have been better, he could have encored with a ten minute version of Cyprus Avenue, and at the end screamed "It's too late to stop now", thrown down the mic an stormed off the stage.

But what we did get is a Van who was engaged throughout, great sound, nice sightlines and a show worthy of the ages. The setlist is below. Trust that even though the man never spoke to the audience, he was pointing out solos generously, and letting the band do its thing. Setlist surprises were Little
Village and Philosopher's Stone, but the highlight had to be the extended version of Fair Play, including scat, harmonica and a solo from David Hayes on the stand-up bass that looked like he was making love to it. And one night after an abbreviated "You Know What They're Writing About" when the audience got enthusiastic a little too early, the same thing happened except Van then went straight to the Rainbow in his Soul and Making It Real One More Time and ripped it up.

Oh, and he needed the 90-minute clock, because the show clocked in at 88 minutes. But a sublime 88 minutes it was.
-Rick

Setlist

Northern Muse (Solid Ground)

This Love of Mine

Fair Play

Foreign Window

The Mystery

Queen of the Slipstream

It's All In The Game

In The Garden

Little Village

Moondance

Help Me

Philosopher's Stone

And The Healing Has Begun

Gloria

Big Hand For The Band
Paul Moran
Tony Fitzgibbon
David Hayes
Richie Buckley
Jay Berliner
Bobby Ruggiero

{Images via Erik Kabik}

25-Sep-09 Hard Rock, Las Vegas Concert Review
Vegas News
Morrison, wearing his iconic black Fedora and dark sunglasses, performed some of his greatest tunes and demonstrated his powerful and dynamic vocal prowess as the audience hung on every note. At times you could hear a pin drop in the Joint as he skatted and whispered out some of his vocals and then slowly and soulfully built them up into soaring powerful deliveries that got the crowd on its feet and into full roaring applause and cheers.

The sold out crowd was fully engaged with Morrison throughout. He was in full command of the stage, his large backing band and the gold microphone and gold microphone stand embellished with the initials VM. Morrison also played piano, guitar, saxophone and harmonica throughout the show.

Highlights included the tunes In The Garden, Moondance ( a jazzy version reminicent of classic Miles Davis and Art Blakey tunes), Gloria, And The Healing Has Begun, That's Life and Have I Told You Lately?
- Erik Kabik


Here's Chris W's review:
Van really came to sing at the Hard Rock tonight. The first half of the show was simply sublime. He stretched every song out and seemed to be in that spiritual "higher plane." The Voice and the band were in total sync. The newly renovated Joint was somewhat cavernous but this is Vegas. They obviously had unlimited bucks to spend on sound, lights, video screens, etc. and it showed.

Highlights included a beautiful Fair Play, In the Garden, Foreign Window, and Mystery. His tone wandered a bit at the beginning of Slipstream but he brought it back into another drawn out triumph.

Then he went into the real VM "Workshop," All in the Game and he seemed to be impossibly taking it into an even higher realm. He brought the end of "You Know What They're Writing About" to a whisper and started backing away from the mic. The applause quickly built to a crescendo, Van looked up, I think a little disgusted, and abruptly ended the tune. I think the string of medium- to
slow-tempo relatively obscure tunes proved too much for the alcohol-fueled casino crowd.

Next thing you know the band is walking through a perfunctory Moondance (standing ovation) followed by Help Me. He walked off the stage at the end of a well-sung And the Healing Has Begun and we wondered if we would get BEG, Gloria or both. Instead he did Common One with Richie before the usual Gloria closer. It was just about 90 minutes at the end of the last drum crash so I figure he needed another (somewhat longer) song to add to the "encore." The crowd waited
around for a long time thinking they could bring the band back with more applause. They didn't know that Van was probably at the airport before the end of Gloria. Admittedly, the airport in Vegas is pretty close.


Half of one of the best shows I've ever seen is pretty good. Am I too greedy to have wanted a whole one?
- Chris

Setlist
Northern Muse (Solid Ground)
That's Life
Fair Play

The Mystery
Foreign Window
In The Garden
Queen of the Slipstream
Moondance
Help Me
Have I Told You Lately
And The Healing Has Begun

It's All In The Game/You Know What They're Writing
Common One
Gloria

Big Hand For The Band
Paul Moran
Tony Fitzgibbon
David Hayes
Richie Buckley
Jay Berliner
Bobby Ruggiero

{Images via Steven Lawton & Erik Kabik}

Van Fans Pre & Post Show Gatherings

Come enjoy a drink (or two) and meet other Van fans before the show!

Meeting places are listed on the left under the venue info under Concert Schedule. Additional gatherings to be added when confirmed.

Email me if you have any questions or want to suggest a place if you do not see one listed: vanmorrisonnews{at}yahoo.com

Astral Phenomenon: Van Morrison In Conversation, Sort Of

Montreal Gazette
The fact that Van Morrison is on the road performing his 1968 album Astral Weeks might suggest he’d be keen to reminisce about the recording, heralded as a masterpiece by too many musicians and critics to count.

But if you think that, you might not know the first thing about the mercurial singer.

In an email interview with the Gazette, Morrison was dismissive when asked how the original album sounds to his ears these days. “It sounds like a 20-something-year-old me,” he wrote. “I do not listen to it. But I suppose it sounds like it always did.”

In the 1979 essay collection Stranded: Rock and Roll For a Desert Island, the iconoclastic – and difficult to please – critic Lester Bangs said Astral Weeks was “the rock record with the most significance in my life so far.” In a rhapsodic retrospective, Bangs referred to a “swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.”

Even if such assessments were meaningful to Morrison – which is doubtful – it wouldn’t make him any more inclined to preserve the record as a museum piece. When its 40th anniversary came around last year, Morrison celebrated by performing the whole album, slightly resequenced, over two November nights at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

“The whole point is, I wanted to do it live with full orchestration – and that is what I did,” he wrote. “Plus, most of these songs are the least played in my whole repertoire.”

The Hollywood Bowl shows, subsequently released on CD and DVD, featured a small string section and enough musicians to comfortably navigate the unusual chamber jazz and folk sounds of the original release. Guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on the first Astral Weeks, returned for the live revisit. Without providing specifics, Morrison wrote that his Oct. 1 concert here will feature “about the same lineup as in Hollywood.”

The Hollywood Bowl concerts were intended as a one-shot deal. New York and London followed early this year, however, and before long, a full tour was under way.

“Demand was the only reason it carried on,” Morrison wrote. “I only intended two shows in Hollywood to get the recording down live in front of an audience. I prefer live music to studio – especially for a project like Astral Weeks. It gives it a fullness a studio would not have allowed for.”

It’s hard not to be struck by the difference between Morrison’s vocal performance on the 1968 recording and his approach to the 2008 re-invention. On the original, there’s a nervous energy and a sense of uncharted territory that announces an untamed, raw talent – a bona fide original who was probably not yet sure, at 23, of his place in the music business, let alone the world.

At that point, Morrison had had only one hit since leaving Belfast R&B rockers Them: the infectious, catchy Brown Eyed Girl, released the previous year. And his new label, Warner Bros., could only have been hoping for more of the same.

It’s a sure bet that no label suit was wishing for an impossible-to-categorize batch of lengthy free-form compositions with jazz players weaving a wondrous path around the singer’s folk- and blues-based meditations. Not to mention inscrutable lyrics that were more likely to feature drag queens and dying loved ones than brown-eyed girls.

But it was what it was. And it was brought to life by Morrison, singing and playing acoustic guitar, augmented by blue-chip jazz players like Berliner, who had played with Charles Mingus, bassist Richard Davis, who had worked with Miles Davis and the late Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay, along with Van’s own sideman John Payne on flute and soprano sax. With the eight tracks that make up the album recorded over only two sessions – a middle session yielded nothing useable – a classic was born.

Like many classics, however, it sold very little – at least not for a long time. After years of ending up on all-time-greatest-album lists in every major rock periodical you can think of, Astral Weeks earned its gold record only in 2001.

“(It) is a work of such singular beauty, such sustained emotional intensity, that nothing recorded before or since sounds even remotely similar,” Sean O’Hagan wrote in the London Observer last November, encapsulating the slow-building acclaim that eventually added commercial respectability to artistic praise.

The 2008 Astral Weeks, at least as captured on the live CD, is a different animal. It shows Morrison fully self-assured, deeper-voiced and comfortable with a technique that has been honed and crafted, yet still depends on wild abandon for its full force. Challenged by the songs, he sounds at the top of his game.

Which means that while the printed lyrics might say “And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first/ And I will drink clear clean water for to quench my thirst,” what comes out of Morrison’s mouth is “Allathrowamanywayenstepahedgesfirst/ Asadrinkthecleclewallafoddaquenchamythirst.”

Through much of the performance, Morrison is singing in tongues, his voice channeling mystical impressions from somewhere else.

For Morrison, it just comes down to doing what he has always done. “I do not assess it,” he wrote in response to a question regarding the difference between his vocal approach to the Astral Weeks material then and now. “I just do what I do in the moment. I have to have a non-contrived element to all my singing.

“I did not do it the same way twice then and I do not do it the same way twice now. It just happens organically that way,” he explained.

Oddly enough, while much of Morrison’s catalogue has been remastered, Astral Weeks and its hugely successful follow-up, Moondance (1970), are among those that have not been upgraded to state-of-the-art sound.

“I spent a year of my life getting those remasters together,” Morrison wrote. “It was all me. They just ran it through a machine after I did all the work. I retained back, from Universal, half of the remasters. And I intend to put those out on my own at some point – maybe.”

The need for that kind of artistic control is evidenced by Morrison’s insistence on producing his own albums – pretty much since Astral Weeks.

“For one thing, my recordings do not get ruined or stamped with someone else’s opinion, who could not possibly understand where I am coming from musically,” he wrote. “No producer has ever contributed anything to any of my recordings. They have just detracted and pushed back vocals.”

Anyone who has listened to Morrison’s body of work knows that he has an even lower opinion of anyone on the business side of music. Still lower: people who exploit his life to sell books.

“There will always be people who think they know something they have no idea about – and I am one of those things,” he wrote. “It’s bizarre when people write entire books about you and the music who have no clue what they are talking about. That is not to mention the people who make things up just to appear like they are ‘involved,’ or in the know. I am not into that. I have my peace now, but I get it from other sources that no one knows about.”

Morrison also had a few choice words for the state of the way people consume music now. Certainly, in an age where the album is in danger of extinction and music is being mixed and matched via digital downloads, track by arbitrary track, it’s hard to imagine the modern-day descendent of an indivisible work like Astral Weeks ever taking hold.

“The demise of the album was the demise of the record business,” Morrison wrote. “Now it’s just compressed air and digitized distortion of original resonance. That is a shame.”

Still, Morrison has not closed the door on future album-related projects that might echo the Astral Weeks revisit. Queried about his current thoughts on what some consider one of his masterpieces, the 1991 album Hymns To the Silence, he offered a tantalizing bit of information.

“Hymns is one of the albums I would like to rework live,” he wrote. “I hear different things when I listen to it now, and I would like to experiment with it at some point.”
-Bernard Perusse

Van Morrison performs Oct. 1 at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $100 to $250. Phone 514-842-2112 or go to www.laplacedesarts.com

Exciting Van Video News!!

Make sure you check out Van's official video channel, YouTube - OfficialExileFilms, which is in the process of being updated - new videos added today. Expect more to come very soon! Some of the footage will be familiar to fans but there shall also be new edits and new material appearing as well!

The aim is to provide Van's global fanbase with a quality, easy-to-access source of great, Van footage.

To Be Born Again Documentary To Be Released In Movie Theaters

Times Online
Film to show Van Morrison is own man
The Northern Ireland-born singer hopes to clear up 'myths' about his past

Nobody ever suspected there’d be days like this: Van Morrison is directing a documentary chronicling his experience in reviving Astral Weeks, a 40-year-old album, in an effort to dispel myths about himself and his career.

One of the music industry’s most reluctant celebrities, the Northern Ireland-born singer-songwriter would never have been expected to co-operate with a behind-the-scenes documentary, let alone make it. Entitled To Be Born Again, it will be released early next year.

The documentary will show Morrison rehearsing for the Astral Weeks tour which began at the Hollywood Bowl last November, and contains lengthy interviews with him and fly-on-the-wall footage shot over the past year.

To Be Born Again will first be shown in arthouse cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, and Morrison is also considering entering the production for the Sundance and Cannes film festivals.

The musician, who has spent much of his career avoiding the media, said he decided to make the documentary so he could “set the record straight”.

Gigi Lee, Van Morrison’s business partner, said he wants to correct a number of misconceptions, such as the belief that all his songs are autobiographical.

“Van tells his own story for the first time so people can hear the truth direct from the man himself rather than relying on the false planted stories of any tabloid,” said Lee.

“The film dispels all the books written by those who do not know him and never met him, who took it upon themselves to tell the public tall tales. It dispels the pretenders and false friends quite well.

“It’s all Van in fine form — raw, candid and completely brilliant in his ability to convey to the audience the nuance of his music. It’s his story, direct from him, without all the mythology connected to it, without all the voluminous fabrications that have been written about it.”

A trailer for the documentary, carried on the website of producer Darren Doane, shows Morrison in the back of a car. He spots some fans with records on a street corner and shouts out the window to them, in a gruff American accent: “Why don’t you buy some new ones?” before rolling up the window and muttering, “f***”.

In another part of the trailer, 64-year-old Morrison tells the camera: “I’ve got these scars. Why do I have to keep showing people the scars all the time, you know what I mean?”

Morrison would like the film to depict him as “a proud Ulster-Scot”, Lee said, “and that whatever people derive from his music is much more about them and their thoughts and projections than him as a songwriter. Each composition is a made-up, architected song and story — his songs are not at all autobiographical”.

Last year at the Hollywood Bowl was the first time Morrison had performed Astral Weeks in one complete concert set. A live album and film — Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl — on Morrison’s new EMI-distributed label, Listen to the Lion Records, followed. There was also a film of the concert, which included an orchestral string section and some of the musicians who had played on the original Astral Weeks sessions in 1968.

Written when he was just 23 and recorded in two days, Astral Weeks failed to crack the charts when it was originally released. The album sold poorly for years and was neglected by his record company.

“It received no promotion from Warner Brothers — that’s why I never got to play the songs live,” Morrison told Rolling Stone magazine last November. But the album has since been hailed as the Belfast musician’s best work. In 2003, Rolling Stone rated Astral Weeks No 19 on its list of 500 greatest albums of all time.

Morrison has also shied away from award ceremonies. He wasn’t in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1993 when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though he did accept honorary degrees from the University of Ulster in 1992 and Queen’s University in 2001. He also became an OBE in 1996.
-Gabrielle Monaghan