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