More North American Shows Added In September & October

25-Sep-09 Las Vegas, NV - The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel

26-Sep-09 Wells Fargo Theatre, Denver

29-Sep-09 Chicago, IL - Chicago Theatre

30-Sep-09 Toronto, CA - Massey Hall

01-Oct-09 Montreal, CA - Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier

JUST ADDED
02-Oct-09 Toronto, CA - Massey Hall

24-Oct-09 Waterbury, CT, USA Palace Theater

25-Oct-09 New York, USA Wamu Theater

28-Oct-09 Mashantucket, CT, USA MGM Foxwoods

San Francisco Examiner Interview With Shana Morrison

San Francisco Examiner
Shana Morrison’s back making music

Shana Morrison’s famous father, Van Morrison, has had a rather high profile lately, not only with his special “Astral Weeks” concerts, but in countless interviews the usually quiet Celt has granted to promote the rare events.

“Every magazine, every newspaper, every TV show — my dad’s there,” Shana says. “He talked to more press in the past year than in the previous 20 years combined. People were running up to me going, ‘Did you know Van’s on “Regis” right now?’ He surprised everybody.”

Shana — a blustery blues belter in her own right — often accompanies her father onstage. But not this time.

In fact, since the 2007 solo disc “That’s Who I Am” on her own Belfast Violet Records, the Mill Valley resident has kept an almost nonexistent profile locally; she’s finally emerging Sunday in her hometown with the Hippie Chick Twang SheBang, a special in-the-round evening with three other songwriters, Kim McLean, Devon O’Day and Eve Selis.

Where exactly has she been for the past two years?
For a hint, Morrison points to her once flaming red mane, now trimmed shoulder-length short and dyed a more timid brown.

For months now, she says, she’s been living the office life in Palo Alto, working 60 hours a week for a new Internet startup that prequalifies prospective employees for high-tech positions.

“Companies like Yahoo and Google have so many applications coming in, so we screen them through our Web site,” she says. “They want to be a Java programmer? They do the Java test. And we also do personality tests, math and logic and English tests.”

The singer only returned to Mill Valley, and her songwriting, a month ago.

“As a musician, you have to diversify,” Shana says. “You wear different hats, do different jobs to balance everything out. And it’s great to take my mind off music for awhile. When I come back, I’m always refreshed and reinvigorated.”

That’s how she hit on her novel SheBang concept, an evening of serious female composers trading songs and stories that’s already wowed Nashville. O’Day even launched an Internet radio station at live365.com called the Hippie Chick Twang Cast, featuring similar artists.

It feels great to be back, says Shana, who actually took some of her company’s tests before she left.

“I got a bad grade on the English one,” she says. “And then I did the personality test, and the results said, ‘You should never attempt to do anything creative, and you will never be a leader.’ So I’ve wasted my entire life!”
-Tom Lanham

IF YOU GO
The Hippie Chick Twang SheBang with Shana Morrison
Where: Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley
When: 7 p.m. Sunday
Tickets: $18 to $25
Contact: (415) 383-9600, www.142throckmortontheatre.com

New Van Morrison Documentary, To Be Born Again, To Be Released in Early 2010
Rolling Stone
What started as a few shows to revisit Van Morrison’s 1968 classic Astral Weeks — an album he’d never previously performed live — has blossomed into a much larger celebration of the LP. First, Morrison turned a November 2008 performance in Los Angeles into the live film/album Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Now he’s on a full-blown Astral Weeks tour that will run at least through this fall, and there are more related releases in the near future: Morrison is so dedicated to his Astral Weeks revival that fans will be able to witness the entire year-long process of rediscovering the record in the forthcoming feature-length documentary To Be Born Again.

The film, slated for an early 2010 release, will draw from live performances, interviews, rehearsals and other behind-the-scenes footage, starting with the first Hollywood Bowl shows last fall. The doc features footage shot exclusively during the past year, and Morrison (who’s directing) is looking forward to finally telling his story the way he wants it to be told. “The film shows the real Van Morrison,” explains Darren Doane, the filmmaker who co-directed the Live at the Hollywood Bowl concert film and will be working alongside Morrison for the documentary. “It’s his film. And the film is about exposing and tearing down all the myths about Van Morrison and the music industry as a whole.”

Watch Preview of To Be Born Again

For Morrison, Astral Weeks — an album that sold poorly for years and was neglected by his record company upon its release — has stood as a metaphor for his long history of breaking boundaries and pushing artistic limits. “It received no promotion from Warner Bros. — that’s why I never got to play the songs live,” he told Rolling Stone last November. Reclaiming the album as his own through thrilling live performances during the past year has been a liberating experience for Morrison, whose recent Astral Weeks shows have been some of the most inspired performances of his whole career. Using Astral Weeks as his spiritual and artistic focus, Morrison has been revisiting other similarly overlooked portions from his immense catalog, performing breathtaking versions of rarities “Fair Play” and “Streets of Arklow” from the underappreciated 1974 album Veedon Fleece at recent shows in the Northeast.

As for other projects in the works, Morrison is, as always, writing new material but remains focused on his Astral Weeks revival, gearing up for a set of U.S. shows this fall while he puts the finishing touches on To Be Born Again. As Doane explains, the film will be “just one more aspect of Van creating.” As director of the film, Van Morrison is behind all of the creative decisions for the documentary and the film should unmistakably be a product of Morrison’s artistic vision. As Doane puts it, “It’s another 90-120 minutes of pure Van art.”
-Jon Bernstein The Pretender

08-Aug-09 Atlantic City Concert Review

Here's Dan's review:
Nicer venue at Caesars than expected, especially with the name Circus Maximus. About 1,600 seats and a potent, crystal-clear sound system. Much more definition in the instruments and voice than at the DAR in DC. No changes from the Friday night DC setlist, except for Game added in early part of set and Gloria to end the gig. It was another superb performance that was both deeply serious and irresistably joyous and upbeat. Van has broken out that sweet humming he does for these gigs.



The audience was along for the ride, and seemed to enjoy every minute of it. Van and the band's presentation has been so quietly dramatic that the audiences have been allowing Morrison to work deeply and mine whatever improvisational vein he wishes.

Morrison's band has been called on to improvise as never before, and all these wonderful players have risen to the challenge. Van and Jay Berliner were going at it so juicily during Ballerina that Morrison laughed in delight. Tony Fitzgibbon and Richard Buckley have been their usual excellent selves, and all the band deserves to be name-checked.

Last night's Arklow locked into a deep Celtic blues. Foreign Window featured Van "sleeping on a pallet on somebody's floor". In Madame Joy George, he warns about the "frickin cops". In Slim Slo, Morrison rhapsodized about the Rock Island Line "a very fine line" and also evoked memories about emerging from the German doctor's office with some railway carriage charms and feeling like he was "walking on air. One pill to take you up, two to take you back down."Sweet Thing into Burning Ground was a showcase for Van's emotional control and power.

This was a marvelous run of gigs, save the runt on Thursday in DC. Boston was magical; 2nd Night DC may have been the most beautiful show I have ever heard from Van; and Atlantic City was filled with a life-affirming sense of wonder. Looks like the train shows no signs of stopping through the rest of the summer and into the days of the leaves.
-Dan M.

Setlist:
Northern Muse (Solid Ground)
Fair Play
The Mystery
Foreign Window
Streets Of Arklow/You Don't Pull No Punches
All In The Game
In The Garden
Astral Weeks
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing>Burning Ground
Cyprus Avenue
The Way Young Lovers Do
Ballerina
Madame George
On Hyndford Street
Gloria

Big Hand For The Band!
Tony Fitzgibbon
Richie Buckley
Michael Graham
Terry Adams
Bobby Ruggiero
David Hayes
Jay Berliner
Paul Moran
Rick Schlosser

[Image via Taylor Hill/Getty Images]

NPR
Van Morrison Revisits His 1968 Classic
(Audio Below)

Van Morrison's 1968 Astral Weeks is perhaps the seminal album of the folk-rock genre. Morrison has described the album as a series of short stories and impressions, some gathered from his time spent in New York and Cambridge, Mass.

"It's just impressions, basically, things people were saying," Morrison says. "Songs come from strange sources."

But when Morrison approached his record label with the album, they almost shelved it.

"All they did was release it," Morrison says. As they call it in the music business, the album was 'buried.' That was kind of the order of the day. You just got ripped off — that's just the way it was."

The Album That Would Not Go Away

But over the years, the album kept coming up. It was a perennial favorite in polls with titles like "What is the greatest album of all time?" On the other hand, Morrison himself had been content to forget the album ever happened.

"It was suppressed in my memory," Morrison says. "As far as I was concerned, it just didn't exist."

Now, the album has an almost mythological status in pop culture. Everyone from Glen Hansard to Johnny Depp has talked about how it changed their lives.

"I don't know what to say because it didn't change my life," says Morrison. "I don't know what to make of [the mythology]. It's like any sort of art form — it's whatever it means to you."

Morrison's cynicism goes further.

"Rock is a brainwash — I think that's where your mythology goes back to," Morrison says. "It's the most pretentious area in music. It's got singers who don't really sing."

In any event, this year Morrison will be touring select cities and performing every song from Astral Weeks. But he says not to expect the sound of his 1968 recordings from his live performances.

"I'm not this 21- or 22-year-old guy," Morrison says. "You move on."

-Guy Raz

07-Aug-09 Washington, DC Concert Review


The Baltimore Sun's Midnight Sun Blog has a review of the show.

Here is Mark's review:

Van Morrison performed Astral Weeks last night for a very appreciative Washington DC crowd at DAR Constitution Hall. My wife and I arrived at DAR around 7:30pm and we immediately snagged a $35 Astral Weeks tour T-shirt (seems to be a leftover from the Hollywood Bowl and NYC concert runs). We got to our seats (Row G Orch) which were really second row just to the left of the grand piano. Our view of the entire Astral Weeks orchestra was somewhat obstructed but we could see Van the entire show. Couldn't see the drummer or the violinist very well due to the piano blocking the view. We did a great close up view (about 15 ft. away) of Van at the piano during the opening tune, Northern Muse (Solid Ground). That was a treat!

We sat next to several folks from North and South Carolina who had made the car trip up to Washington DC. Very nice Van Fans! We also chatted with the security guy who was at the foot of the stage. He spoke of last night's (Thurs) concert and how he only recognized the two "60s songs" at the end of the show! (BEG and Gorilla). So, I was certainly expecting that we would get at least Mystic Eyes/Gorilla as the encore. As you will read later on encores were not in Friday's "Astral plans".

At 8:10pm the house lights went dark and band members took the stage quickly followed by our hero, Van The Man. Van took his seat at the grand piano and began the beautiful slow arrangement of Northern Muse (Solid Ground). I really enjoyed this version and it was fresh to our ears. The show was off to a great beginning!

Next up was Fair Play. My wife and I have dreamed for decades of hearing anything off of Veedon Fleece and we finally were given the opportunity last night. The sound was lush and so romantic. Van's vocal chords opened up fully during Fair Play and you could not help but surrender to the beauty of it all. I was in a trance already. Lots of fans stood at the end of Fair Play and applauded. Van was "2 for 2" and batting 1.000 coming out of the box.

Fair Play was followed up by a mediocre reading of The Mystery. Van never "let himself go" and did not probe the mysteries of this song. It was a very straightforward rendition and he was too fidgety and distracted by something going on with the sound. He asked for his microphone levels to be turned up several times with hand gestures and few of his little barking commands. Oh well, two for three at the point.

Foreign Window was next! NGNMNT is a fave of ours and my wife and I smiled at each other upon hearing the opening notes.....this one was done perfectly! Van gave it his all and seemed to be enjoying the sounds coming from the band. Van really concentrated on the vocal beauty of the song. Some very nice improv passages towards the end of Foreign Window.

Back to Veedon Fleece and a rousing rendition of Streets of Arklow (with a snippet of You Don't Pull No Punches tacked on the end for good measure). Van and the band absolutely nailed this one. The flute, the violin, the piano, the guitar were all featured. Lush lush lush and again you just had to surrender to the beauty of this masterpiece. We were in heaven. About half the audience stood to clap at the end.

Next up was a breathtakingly beautiful rendition of In The Garden (back to NGNMNT). I was lucky enought to have seen Van on the NGNMNT tour at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia July 1986, and this 2009 version was even better than the 1986 version. There are really no words to describe the connection that Van made with the audience last night during In The Garden. It was absolutely unreal. The entire crowd was in a trance during the whispered ending. Again, a majority of the crowd stood at the end to show their appreciation for this masterpiece. Van was batting 5 for 6 on the pre Astral warm up songs.

Now on to Astral Weeks:

By now everyone has at least heard the live version of AW at the Hollywood Bowl. I will try and convey what was different about last night's version.

Astral Weeks was cut a bit short. Van never got into this one last night. He seemed to rush the ending and never got into the improv section of it. Nobody transcended with Van because Van never tried to take the title track to a special place. Oh well, things got better in a hurry.

Beside You was allowed a bit more breathing room and Van got into the AW groove a bit more. His toe was at least in the water on Beside You. The band really came together as well and things started clicking towards the end of Beside You. Very well done.

Slim Slow Slider was even better than the Hollywood Bowl version - a complete connection between Van, his band, and the DAR audience. I recalled how much I enjoyed the version from the Supper Club 1996 shows, but this 2009 version was even better. (I hope that a tape of the show appears so that I can hear this one again.) My wife and I agreed that this was one of the best versions of Slim we had ever heard! Outstanding!

Next up was the surprise (and piece de resistance) of the evening..........Sweet Thing and Burning Ground. My wife and I had tears flowing at the end (tears of joy). Everyone at DAR rose to their feet at the end of Burning Ground - fans were cheering and whistling and everyone had a look of amazement and wonder on their faces. There is nothing quite like this one-two combination of Sweet Thing and Burning Ground. I witnessed the same thing in June 2004 at the Theater at MSG. Van acted out the carrying of the sack during the noonday sun! Van, the band and the crowd completely connected and we were all in a trance! My soul was on the roof of DAR Constitution Hall and I have never felt a religious experience quite like it. The dynamics of Burning Ground are pure genius. The crowd respected Van during the quiet parts and there were no yahoos yelling the rebel yell. You could have heard a pin drop. Stunning stunning stunning. Nuff said.

Next up was Cyprus Avenue. It was well done but how could anything possibly follow what we witnessed during Burning Ground. I was still thinking of Burning Ground during Cyprus Avenue! I couldn't concentrate. I wanted to hear Sweet Thing/Burning Ground over and over and live through that experience again.

Next up was a very bouncy version of The WayYoung Lovers Do. Great stuff and the band really nails it. Nice solos from everyone.

Ballerina was beautiful. This was another highlight and Van had the audience laughing during the "it's getting very very very very very late" part about the light being on the left side of your head (cheek slap and all). Van's vocal dynamics during this one were spot on.

And finally we got Madame George. A bit short and Van was clearly eyeing the exit stage left signs and was anxious to wrap things up. Nothing special about Madame George last night.

Then the troubles started. Van was not happy with the band's performance or the sound during Hyndford Street. Van was moving his microphone stand around and fussing with his sheet music and lyrics on the stand. He was clearly agitated and annoyed about something. He barked out some orders to a few bandmembers and fumbled over a few of the words during the Hyndford Street reading. He walked off to the left of the stage and never returned. The audience was left at the altar, cheering and hoping for more. The stage hands began breaking down the equipment and the stunned audience accepted the reality that there would be no encore. A very strange ending to a beautiful evening of music.

Shannon has posted her thoughts on her blog.

Setlist:

Northern Muse (Solid Ground)

Fair Play

The Mystery

Foreign Window

Streets Of Arklow/You Don't Pull No Punches (snippet)

In The Garden

Astral Weeks

Beside You

Slim Slow Slider

Sweet Thing/Burning Ground

Cyprus Avenue

The Way Young Lovers Do

Ballerina

Madame George

On Hyndford Street

Big Hand For The Band!
Tony Fitzgibbon
Richie Buckley
Michael Graham
Terry Adams
Bobby Ruggiero
David Hayes
Jay Berliner
Paul Moran
Rick Schlosser

[Image via Brian Reed/Washington Post]

06-Aug-09 Washington, DC Concert Review & Interview With Van

Washington Post
The Van Morrison who showed up at Constitution Hall on Thursday clearly views himself as an artist, not an entertainer. So anybody wanting to hear Van Morrison smash hits would have had more success finding a good jukebox or hitting an open mike night at the local coffeehouse.

But for folks who looked forward to spending the evening with a distaff diva, Van the Man delivered.

Quibblers could harp about Morrison staying away from familiar material as if it'd give him swine flu. And that he modulated his voice less than Willie Nelson and mumbled enough to owe Bob Dylan royalties. His people skills were invisible -- not so much as a hello or thanks to fans who'd paid up to $350 face value to share the room with him, and he yelled at bandmates and stagehands like Buddy Rich on a tour bus.

But, oh, what a supply of attitude and talent! An artist's supply, even.

Morrison's current tour showcases material from "Astral Weeks," a 1968 record that got him his greatest reviews, though it wasn't a big seller and had no radio hits. It's the kind of record best listened to alone in a dark room with a mildly mind-altering substance, and clearly comes from an age long before iTunes and singles downloads. In other words, "Astral" is not an obvious choice for the sort of album-centric tours that so many vintage artists are giving these days. But that's Van being Van. Backed by a large band with strings and horns, he reprised tunes such as "The Way Young Lovers Do" and "Slim Slow Slider" while being at once intense and mellow, hushed and swinging. "Sweet Thing" flaunted the Belfast-born Morrison's special brand of Celtic rhythm and blues.

(Read the rest of the review after the jump.)

Morrison, 63, has never been a poster boy for good living. Thursday night he looked like a bloated pallbearer in his dark suit, dark sunglasses and a black hat. But his voice was incredibly strong and clear whenever he wanted it to be. He didn't want it to be that often: For "Cyprus Avenue," he used his lyrics, scat-like, to send a rhythmic rather than verbal message.

Morrison treated his band and crew horribly. In the midst of "Fair Play," one of a handful of non-"Astral" tunes in the set, he decided he didn't like the tempo and screamed at his drummer to switch from brushes to sticks. Morrison was close enough to the microphone that the crowd couldn't avoid taking in the humiliation. He later summoned a roadie to the center of the stage to move microphone and music stands a few feet away from him, then screamed an obscenity at him while telling him to leave the stage. Then Morrison launched into "In the Garden," a 1986 spiritual glorious enough to get him right with god, flaws and all.

The clearest show of respect for the performer and the performance: There was no talking in the nearly full house as the band played, and, despite all the deep cuts, no shouted requests between songs for his hits. At night's end, Morrison touched on his singles file briefly, though it was so little and so late that it felt more like a taunt than a reward. He turned the band loose on "Gloria," a three-chord garage rocker that he wrote as a teenager and was later covered reverently by, among others, Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix and another iconic Morrison, Jim of the Doors.

But the biggest surprise came with the opening notes of "Brown Eyed Girl." Given all that came earlier, Morrison couldn't have shocked the crowd more if he'd Tasered everybody. But, consistent to the end, Morrison performed his gem with apparent disdain. He sang the opening of the chorus - "Do you remember when we used to sing" - but turned his back to the seats to let the crowd take the "Sha la la la la la la la la la la ti da." He knew everybody would remember.
-Dave McKenna

Washington City Paper
Van Morrison’s gift was the ability to cop a religious experience from the little stuff—the shade of a redwood tree; Jackie Wilson on a staticky radio; a glass of water. Oh, and women—not for nothing was his first hit (with Irish rockers Them) an elision: Gloria, the chick, and gloria, the great hosanna.

That spiritual suggestibility came off rather muted on Thursday night, when Morrison brought his Astral Weeks revival tour to DAR Constitution Hall. Clad in his signature pinstripe suit, tinted sunglasses, and the fedora that’s been glued to his head for the past decade, Van addressed the audience only once—at the end, to thank the band—and otherwise seemed more concerned with PA glitches than with, say, his immortal soul.

The current tour is the first in which Morrison has performed Astral Weeks in its entirety. In certain circles, this is a big deal. And while he isn’t so much performing the songs as trotting them out, the thrill of recognition is enough to carry the suite. Chalk up some of that eeriness to the presence of Richard Davis, who played upright bass (arguably the lead instrument) on the original record. Over those freely wrought, back-turning basslines, Morrison sang with his new voice—a bark-like thing with little time for dynamics but still capable of the righteous flutter and the tearful break. But woe to he who hasn’t memorized the record: Morrison’s latter-day delivery leaves much to the imagination, lyrics-wise; and the slurs and mumbles that once seemed inspired now seem merely unavoidable. Also: A woman in front of me laughed when Morrison promised to “stroll the merry way / and jump the hedges first”; and “Beside You” now sounds vaguely like a threat.

“Northern Muse (Solid Ground),” meanwhile, had Morrison showing off his facility on the piano, and while he omitted his traditional soul-growl from “Listen to the Lion,” he blew a churning harmonica vamp on “Mystic Eyes.” Van’s still spinning a clipped cadence and being willfully inscrutable, and the through-the-nose crowd lapped it up.

Before the performance, Morrison responded by email to a number of my questions. His responses—terse and, yes, willfully inscrutable—below:

Last November, we heard that Astral Weeks at the Bowl would be a one-off. What prompted the decision to tour?

Because the Bowl was so well received, the demand grew. I originally intended just two shows in Hollywood, to get it recorded live from the stage, raw and uncut. And that was it.

While you’ve done songs like “Cyprus Avenue” in concert before, these shows are the first time you’ve played Astral Weeks in its entirety. Why never before? Why now?

Because this music is timeless, for one, and the record did not get any promotion whatsoever when it came out. These are the least performed songs in my repertoire.

One of the mysteries of Astral Weeks is the fantastic looseness of the band. On the subsequent four records—the exception, perhaps, being Moondance—your backing groups hew to a tighter, more consistent sound. Did you take a stronger hand in arrangements after Astral Weeks? How did the experience of writing and recording that album affect your approach in the studio?

Yes, their brief was to “follow the vocal.” And that was exactly what they did, under my direction.

You’ve spoken publicly about your experience with stage fright. Has that fear dissipated with age?

I do not have stage fright any more, though I had it a couple of times in the past.

How does your current lineup stack up with, say, the Caledonia Soul Orchestra or the Caledonia Soul Express? Is there a different approach on this tour?

The Caledonia Soul Orchestra was from another time when it was all about going deep into the music and nothing else.

What will your next record sound like?

Whatever my soul dictates, I suppose. Good question.

What is the first record you remember listening to? The first record you bought? The last record you bought?

The first record I remember hearing was Bing Crosby on the radio—a song called “Please.” The first record I bought was a 78 of Sonny Terry, an instrumental. I believe the last record I bought was Louis Armstrong—I buy those over and over…even if I already have it!

“St. Dominic’s Preview,” as far as I can tell, is a song about what to do once you’ve gotten what you’ve always wanted; for you, I imagined it was also about reconciling poetic integrity with commercial success. Is that fair? And can you please explain where the idea for the song came from—what is St. Dominic’s Preview?

I was writing at the time—I remember reading about a St. Donimic’s Church in San Francisco. Also, there was a French song about St. Dominic, which may or may not be relevant because songs come in such mysterious ways sometimes….

This is a hobbyist question, but I can’t help myself: If you could compose a band of any artists from any era, what would that band look like? E.g., James Jamerson on bass, Howard Johnson in the horn section…who would that be for you?

I have been around long enough to know there is no “ideal” band. Bands are very individual and work to the musical goals. The ones I might choose may or may not be able to go where I need to go or grasp where I want to be, no matter what their pedigree is. That is a loaded question…but a good one.

- Ted Scheinman

Setlist
Northern Muse
Fair Play
The Mystery
Streets of Arklow
In the Garden
Astral Weeks
Beside You
Slim Slow Slider
Sweet Thing
Cyprus Avenue
Young Lovers Do
Ballerina
Madame George
Listen to the Lion
Foreign Window
It's All in the Game
Queen of the Slipstream
Brown Eyed Girl
Mystic Eyes>Gloria

Big Hand For The Band!
Tony Fitzgibbon
Richie Buckley
Michael Graham
Terry Adams
Bobby Ruggiero
David Hayes
Jay Berliner
Paul Moran
Rick Schlosser










[Images via Taylor Hill/Getty Images]

Washington Times Interview With Van

Washington Times
Van Morrison to revisit 'Astral Weeks' in concert

Financially speaking, 1968 was a hard year for Van Morrison. "Brown Eyed Girl," the songwriter's first single as a solo artist, had become an international hit in 1967, yet a skewed record contract kept Mr. Morrison from receiving any royalty payments. Meanwhile, his label continued to push for more pop-oriented music, hoping to capitalize on the single's success.

When the founder of Bang Records died unexpectedly, Mr. Morrison managed to extricate himself from the contract that had all but bankrupted him. A partnership with Warner Bros followed, allowing greater control of his own music but little money upfront. Virtually penniless, Mr. Morrison began recording a new album in September.

"The lack of support and money did force me to do the record lean in '68," Mr. Morrison recalls via email, "but it turns out that was really to my benefit. I learned that to make a solid record, one does not have to have all the producers, bells and whistles. You just have to have the ability, the patience, the ear and the soul. If you can sing and if you write a solid song, all you need is a microphone."

Although Mr. Morrison would eventually insist on producing his own albums, producer Lewis Merenstein was brought aboard to helm the 1968 recording sessions. "I only remember him going for sandwiches," says Mr. Morrison, who nonetheless allowed Mr. Merenstein to assemble a cast of veteran jazz musicians for the project. Bassist Richard Davis, guitarist Jay Berliner and drummer Connie Kay were among those recruited, and their jazz training lent an improvised, impressionistic elegance to the album. Within one month, "Astral Weeks" was complete.

Although "Astral Weeks" never matched the sales of its predecessor, few albums have better stood the test of time. The music is simultaneously baffling and beautiful, mixing uncanny lyrics with an elastic mix of soul, jazz, Celtic folk and classical tropes. Four decades later, "Astral Weeks" continues to yield new discoveries with each listen.

Mr. Morrison claims the record could have been better, however.

"I have just started listening to some old albums of mine, and I wish I would have never let someone else ever touch my songs in post-production," he says now. Recalling his songs were "butchered and killed" in post-production, he vows, "I will never use a producer for post-production ever again; I like real and I like resonance, and that stuff kills it."

To celebrate the album's 40th anniversary — and to revive those elements that had been lost during production — Mr. Morrison has chosen to revisit the songs in concert. "Astral Weeks" had rarely been played live, since Mr. Morrison refused to perform the material without proper instrumentation. Accordingly, a new cast of jazz musicians was assembled in time for two highly publicized concerts in Los Angeles.

Despite the challenging nature of "Astral Weeks," Mr. Morrison only scheduled one rehearsal before opening night.

"I did not prepare," he says. "I did not want to touch until it was time for me to hit the stage, really. We had one rehearsal, and in my estimation it was not hot. The songs came alive in a whole new way [in concert], though. Forty years later, and I just let it rip as if it was brand new. People are saying that I made it new, which I appreciate tremendously. They noticed!"

The concerts were unanimously popular, prompting the release of a live album, "Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl," as well as the launch of a national tour. Dubbed "Astral Weeks Live," the tour has since sold out multiple venues across the country, bringing more attention to one of the industry's most reluctant celebrities.

"I love music, I hate fame," he admits. "Fame draws in parasites and fools. I love singing, though, and this has been the irony of me doing what I do. It's difficult to reconcile the two, so I just keep doing what I do — reluctantly."

For all his discomfort on the red carpet, however, Mr. Morrison maintains a confident, commanding presence onstage. "Each performance of 'Astral Weeks 2009' has tended to have its own power and its own magic, and luckily it evolves into something different than the time before, in a good and surprising way each time. With solid songs, this is what can happen."
- Andrew Leahey

04-Aug-09 Boston Concert Review

Boston Globe
So how does Van Morrison singing Them gems “Mystic Eyes’’ and “Gloria’’ feel almost superfluous? Well, when he does those tunes after a cathartic reading of his “Astral Weeks’’ album.

Morrison and his band ended last night’s concert at the Citi Performing Arts Center’s Wang Theatre with those garage-rock paeans. And he began the show with some wonderfully introspective fare that climaxed with the spiritual knockout “In the Garden.’’

But it was Morrison’s venture back into his classic 1968 album that made the night one to remember.

Morrison first revisited “Astral Weeks,’’ a work conceived around the time he was living in Cambridge, last fall with a pair of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl that became the foundation for a live album.

Since then he has performed “Astral Weeks’’ shows sparingly and has only a handful on the East Coast this month. So without overdoing this at-times delicate, almost-always intricate piece of work, Morrison is giving the best of himself.

At the Wang, he did not simply sing the eight-song cycle; he reclaimed its themes of rebirth and awakening in a manner that dispelled criticisms he has endured over the years for seeming uninterested.

Looking fit and ready to work, Morrison arrived on stage wearing his trademark dark shades, dark hat, and dark blazer and took his place at a baby grand for “Northern Muse (Solid Ground).’’ The songs played ahead of the “Astral Weeks’’ tunes mirrored the tone and nature of the main-event material. “The Mystery’’ and “Hard Nose the Highway’’ allowed Morrison and his nine-piece band to work through vocal and solo intricacies that would later congeal beautifully around such “Astral’’ fare as “Slim Slow Slider’’ and “Sweet Thing,’’ songs that alchemize folk, jazz, and pop.

Morrison, playing guitar, sax, and harmonica, did not ape the beefed-up arrangements heard on the live album, instead reinventing the reinventions.

The song “Astral Weeks’’ here got trimmed and tightened. “Cypress Avenue’’ veered from the baroque pop of the original into a poetic flight of fancy. “The Way Young Lovers Do’’ arrived in sleek, dynamic fashion, sounding like the smash hit it should have been originally.

Morrison dramatically inhabited the songs. But as wild as Van got, his band stayed calm, easily following the leader’s every artistic twitch.

After singing “Madame George,’’ Morrison spoke the elegiac “On Hyndford Street,’’ and that’s in his heart, where the show ended.
-Scott McLennan

Boston Herald
It’s hard for old dudes to do young music. Bruce Springsteen is running out of “Born to Run” moxie. The Rolling Stones haven’t been in “Street Fighting Man” shape for years.

But Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” - his masterpiece made when he was just into his 20s - was never young music. From the moment Van the Man cut those eight tracks, they were immortal.

Last night at a packed Wang Theatre, Morrison and his nine-piece backing band did all of “Astral Weeks.” It wasn’t that wicked ’68 piece of wax. But it worked.

The Man emerged in black shades, hat and coat, and strapped on a shining white guitar. Plucking out feisty guitar solos and urging his band on with constant waves of his mighty hand, he growled through “Fair Play” and mashed “Streets of Arklow” into “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River.” The three “Veedon Fleece” tunes primed the pump.

With his grand band, Morrison turned the storied LP into something big. He crowded the songs’ intimacy with long solos, swollen arrangements and rumbling, grumbling, tough vocals. Instead of trying to recreate, he interpreted - which is what he’s best at anyway, even with his own catalog.

The title track became less a mystical meditation and more an Irish barn-dance romp. Next, “Slim Slow Sider” (Morrison mixed up the album’s sequence) got the tempo right, but had a fuller sound as Morrison called more and more of his musicians into the mix. For “Beside You” and “Sweet Thing,” the formula was repeated with diminishing returns as each ended with the full band congesting the tunes.

But “Cyprus Avenue,” with its soothing harpsichord and double-bass intro, was rightly balanced. And “Madame George” was the night’s highlight. Finally commanding his band to lay back - no fiddle solos or sax jams - Van the Mystic peeled off those poetic verses.

“Down on Cyprus Avenue,” he called. Then fainter, but bell clear: “With a childlike vision leaping into view/Clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe/Ford & Fitzroy, Madame George.”

That moment was worth the price of admission. Well, almost. Morrison tickets are as ridiculously steep as ever - you can’t see Van for less than a Benjamin.

But no one seemed to complain as Morrison encored with a classic Them medley - the only thing that got the crowd out of their seats and clapping. “Astral Weeks” is wonderful, but rumblin’, ’60s r&b is a great coda.
-Jed Gottlieb

Boston Music Spotlight
Morrison charms Boston faithful with Astral Weeks
If you came to hear mainstream hits like "Moondance" and "Brown Eyed Girl" you came to the wrong place. But, if you came expecting Van Morrison's best you were happily satisfied. And satisfied one should be with tickets going for several hundred dollars, but apparently Van Morrison shows are recession-proof as the legendary Irish star packed them in for a performance of his 1968 classic Astral Weeks along with some other choice numbers. Morrison is notorious for being off as much as he is on. Luckily, the Boston fans caught him on a night where Van the Man certianly lived up to his knickname.

Morrison started off the show on the piano for "Northern Muse (Solid Ground)" starting the show off on solid ground itself as he quickly exhibited his many vocal abilities from his rambling to his held notes born way down in his powerful frame.

For the rest of the show Morrison, dressed in his usual black coat, hat, and shades, took center stage with his white acoustic guitar belting out tune after tune while running his nine-piece band like a Jazz general as he kept to his improvisation tradition, pointing out band members whom he whished to solo. Violinist Tony Fitzgibbon often got the nod, as he did on "The Mystery" before bassist Dave Hayes took his bassline for a walk at the song's conclusion.

Morrison was animated using his hands to invoke a quick saxophone solo from Richie Buckley before he pumped his arms in anticipation of the drum fills on "Hard Nose The Highway". "Streets of Arklow" then segued into "You Don't Pull No Punches" where Morrison built up the energy with calls for several improvisations from his band before taking the song down to a whisper, getting so he quiet that he was amused enough to chuckle to end the song.

Ready to get to Astral Weeks after "In The Garden", Morrison slightly changed the original track order of the album by playing "Slim Slow Slider" , the last song on the album, after the title track opener. Fitzgibbon played a soft solo in "Slider" but got quite lively soon after during "Sweet Thing". Morrison played his harmonica for the first time during the song before taking it down for another delicate ending. He then did some pickin' along with guitarist Jay Berliner in "Ballerina" which provided one of the best jam sessions of the night.

"Madame George" finished off the Astral Weeks performance as Morrison joked, "Gimme Five!" before many fans rose to their feet in awe. The Man took off after the spoken word "On Hyndford Street" only to return a moment later for a short encore that included portions of both "Mystic Eyes" and "Gloria". The encore was appreciated but definitely felt like an afterthought. However, after Morrison exited for the evening during "Gloria" it did give the fans the chance to show their admiration for his stellar band who each individually answered every call Morrison made while sounding so sonically smooth and effortless as an ensemble.

With ticket prices costing a few Bejamins and a classic, yet commcercially unsuccessful album scheduled to be performed, this Van Morrison show surely was aimed towards the diehard fan. Those diehards who know Van Morrison knew he brought the good stuff and it's performances like this that will make fans feel like it was money well spent.
-Kevin McSheffrey

Also - check out Shannon's Blog for her thoughts on the concert in Boston.

Setlist:
Nothern Muse (Solid Ground)
Fair Play
The Mystery
Hard Nose the Highway
Streets of Arklow>You Don't Pull No Punches
In the Garden
Astral Weeks
Slim Slow Slider
Beside You
Sweet Thing
Cypress Avenue
Way Young Lovers
Ballerina
Madame George
On Hyndford Street
Mystic Eyes>Gloria

Big Hand For The Band!
Tony Fitzgibbon
Richie Buckley
Michael Graham
Terry Adams
Bobby Ruggiero
David Hayes
Jay Berliner
Paul Moran
Rick Schlosser

Thanks to Di For Setlist

Boston Herald
‘Astral’ Projection
Van Morrison revisits a landmark work

When Van Morrison ventured into the slipstream to record his legendary 1968 album “Astral Weeks,” he didn’t do it alone. Alongside the young Irish singer/songwriter were some of the top jazzmen of the day, including bassist Richard Davis, drummer Connie Kay, guitarist Jay Berliner - and one feisty, 22-year-old Concord native.

Flute and saxophone player John Payne, who now runs the John Payne Music Center in Brookline, and Morrison were both living in Cambridge in ’68. Payne wound up playing on “Astral Weeks,” a milestone in the Morrison canon that the unpredictable artist decided to re-record live last November at the Hollywood Bowl. The concert and its release on CD drew critical raves; now Morrison returns to Boston on Tuesday to play “Astral Weeks” at Citi Wang Theatre.

How did Payne and Morrison meet?

“A bass player named Tom Kilbania I knew from jam sessions asked me to come and sit in with this singer he was working with,” Payne remembered.

A jazz musician, Payne hadn’t heard of Morrison, who had scored American hits as a member of the Northern Irish band Them and on his own with “Brown-Eyed Girl.” Payne was going to skip the session, but his brother convinced him that Morrison was an up-and-coming pop star. So Payne grabbed his sax and traveled to a Boston coffeehouse called the Catacombs to check out the singer.

“As you know, Van’s short,” Payne said. “Well, I’m tall. So when I went to say hi to him he kind of went, ‘Ugh,’ and didn’t ask me to sit in. I listened to the first set and wasn’t that impressed and almost left. Then Van asked me if I wanted to sit in for the second set. Well, that was the first time I’d played with someone of his caliber. I felt that he could hear me and was responding, changing his voice as he listened to what I was playing.

“The second song we did was ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’ and I realized that this wasn’t some song he was covering, this was his song,” Payne continued. “The next night he asked me back. After that he asked me to join the band.”

When Morrison moved to New York to record “Astral Weeks” and look for better gigs, he brought Payne with him. Payne quickly discovered Morrison was last year’s fashion and that finding work would be a hard-fought battle.

Morrison and band scored support slots for folk hero Tim Hardin and blues master John Lee Hooker, but few people showed up to see the opening act. Payne recalls playing to single-digit audiences some nights.

And he wasn’t fairing much better in the recording studio.

“I was not supposed to be on recordings (with Morrison),” Payne said. “They had some session flute player there the first night of the sessions and he was good. But being 22 and young and brash, I kept telling the producer, ‘Let’s do one more song that I can play on.’ The producer finally let me play. But I didn’t even bring my flute, so I had to borrow the other guy’s, and he wanted time and a half for just sitting there. Well, the song we did was ‘Astral Weeks.’ After that night they decided to keep me as the flute player.”

At the nexus of folk, rock and jazz, the “Astral Weeks” album is unique. Payne knew it from the moment the sessions started. The mix of Berliner’s classical guitar flourishes, Kay’s easy rhythms, Davis’ thumping, woody bass and Payne’s hummingbird flute trills formed the backdrop for Morrison’s magical, mystical Irish verse.

“People think there were a lot of rehearsals,” Payne said, “but there were no rehearsals. Zero. These musicians just came in and did it. They probably don’t even remember the sessions. They probably had two more sessions to do that day.

“And there were very few takes. The whole album was done in three sessions,” Payne added. “But these guys knew how to leave space. They knew how to pick up on what was going on and play into it. It’s the sound of something coming together for the first time.”

Payne remembers having his mind blown listening to Van become the Man from the production booth. But Payne, the unknown kid of the sessions, got to blow some minds, too.

“It was just Van, Richard Davis and I for ‘Slim Slow Slider,’ ” he said. “The take we did was maybe 10 minutes longer than what you hear on the recording. We just kept improvising; we went into some baroque stuff; Van even did some improvising on guitar. When we came into the control room everyone was completely silent. Maybe they were just tired and I’m projecting, but it was amazing.”

It likely wasn’t fatigue that floored the control room, but the interplay between the three artists. “Slim Slow Slider,” the closing cut on “Astral Weeks,” is a standout on an album of standouts.

Morrison seemed to agree: You can hear the singer give a little chuckle as Payne enters with a lilting soprano sax run.

But what was heard on the finished album is only an abbreviated version of the take. As the trio begins its strange jam, the track is cut short.

“I’d like to hear that (whole take) again sometime,” Payne said. “Someone should go to Warner Brothers and dig it up.”

As amazing as the sessions and resulting album were, the release didn’t do much to further Morrison’s career. “Astral Weeks” bombed at first.

“I’ll tell you much how much of a flop it was,” Payne said. “We used to go and try and find it for fun. We used to have to go to three or four record stores to find a copy buried in the M section.”

Eventually, Payne wanted to get back into jazz and headed back to Boston. Though Morrison and Payne crossed paths a few more times over the next couple years, including some hang time at Morrison’s house in Woodstock, N.Y., the two eventually lost touch.

Payne wishes Morrison would have called him for this “Astral Weeks” revival tour. He would have liked a chance to play with Van the Man once more, but he’s not bitter.

“I’m not sad that I’m not on (the new ‘Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl’ album), but I don’t want to hear it now,” he said. “It’s just something that’s in the past for me.”

Well, unless Morrison calls and asks him to join the band for a few numbers on Tuesday.
- Jed Gottlieb

Van Morrison, Tuesday at Citi Wang Theatre. Tickets: $65-$350; 800-432-7250.

TIME Magazine: 10 Questions For Van

21-Jun-09 Cardiff Concert Review
South Wales Argus
THE great man was in great form, as was his superb band of highly accomplished musicians.

Sporting his trademark suit, hat and shades, Morrison joined in on piano, saxophone, guitar and harmonica.

There were the old standard crowd-pleasing favourites like Brown Eyed Girl, Moondance, Gloria and Georgia On My Mind.

But where Morrison really came into his own was with more compositions that fuse blues, jazz and Celtic tinges, some of his music is achingly beautiful. He and his band played straight through for an hour and a half without a break to a packed Wales Millennium Centre.

Numbers like In The Garden, The Philosopher's Stone and Heavy Connection were sublimely played and went down a storm.

Van the Man doesn't do audience banter. He and his musicians just let the music do the talking.
-Iwan Davies

Correspondent Mike's report:

Yesterday in Cardiff was a moving experience in a number of ways. Coming off the first show in my previous post I sent some minor disappointment what with the return to the 90 minute format and no Astral Weeks to be found. When I awoke this morning after show two in Cardiff at a magnificent new facility that had tremendous sound
quality (you could hear a pin drop...) I've come away as we all do - wanting and waiting for more. Here's why. My first thought as I rose was that I needed to re-connect to "Veedon Fleece", another of the storied Van classic albums that
keeps coming up along with Astral Weeks as most celebrated, though never selling terribly well and perhaps under appreciated. Since Van is obviously listening to the comments (thank you Johnny G) and perhaps noting that this album is often referred to in a similar vein by we purists as Astral Weeks -- he continued to mine his gold over these past two nights and all I wanted to do was listen again to that album which I did and it was stunning. I've listened twice since early this morning. So Van did his magic, moving off the Astral Weeks train to a new platform and it appeared that we are on another grand non-stop train. Fair Play led off straight away out of both nights following the opening - Van on piano, growling Northern Muse/Solid Ground, lofts into Moondance and then.... real magic. Fair Play was just stunning again and the flair that Jay Berliner lent with Van coaxing him further on ("Yeah, yeah....") -- we've witnessed that exchange in Astral Weeks sets and it's very clear that Van is enjoying his time on stage with Mr. Berliner. It just builds from there and while you may have heard the two setlists by now, in night two we had some very special additions including Streets of Arklow from that same album but rather than Ned's harmonica, it was Jay and Tony and Paul that helped build it and it was magnificent to hear.

Over the two nights we heard some classics from the vault and now that
I've been able to step away from the Astral Weeks phenom, and while I'd still love to see that again (and it's rumoured) in August... Van did as he does and
reminds us why we keep coming back. He takes us back...way way way back and reinvents the music that propels us all forward to the next gig. I'm on that train & now much as I hate to rush the summer, August can't come soon enough. Here's what we got over two nights, in no particular order:

Solid Ground
Foreign Window
In the Garden
Fair Play
Streets of Arklow
Alan Watts Blues (one of MY all-time favs and Paul Moran was spectacular on piano)
Leaves Come Falling Down
The Mystery
Healing Has Begun
Have I Told You Lately
Philosophers Stone
Queen Of The Slipstream
So Quiet In Here
All In The Game
Georgia
Magic Time
Moondance
Brown Eyed Girl(oops - how'd that get in there?)
Mystic Eyes/Gloria.

Now, that's a dream set list if ever there were one and I know some are probably thinking of their own dream tunes to include.
All I might say is that when you wish upon a star....or whatever it is
that you might wish upon (my wife comes to mind...) Whoever thought we'd get Astral Weeks cover to cover. Now that Veedon Fleece is in the mix, No Guru is back after a decade of absence --- hard to know what lies ahead but suffice to say, this briiliant train continues rolling and we're along for a great ride.
-Mike

Setlist:
Northern muse (Solid Ground)
Moondance
Fair Play
Foreign window
It's All In The Game/You Know What They're Writing About
Allan Watts Blues
The Mystery
When The Leaves Come Falling Down
In The Garden
Streets of Arklow
Philosopher's Stone
Georgia
And The Healing Has Begun
So Quiet In Here
Brown-Eyed Girl
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

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

Thanks to Ivo & Bern for setlist!

20-Jun-09 Bristol, England Concert Review

Bristol Evening Post
VAN THE MAN ON TOP FORM

With ticket prices of £80, this was always destined to be a gig to remember, but Van Morrison’s reputation for unpredictability is the stuff of legend so nobody was taking anything for granted.

In the run-up to this rescheduled gig, there was much talk of the curmudgeonly singer playing tracks from his seminal 1968 album Astral Weeks, as he had recently done in New York and London.

The hefty ticket prices - almost twice what they were the last time he played the venue - certainly suggested the prospect of something as special as a rare airing of his most famous work.

Dressed in his trademark dark suit, black fedora and aviator shades, Morrison walked on stage on the stroke of 8pm with his seven-piece band and he clearly meant business from the outset.

With no acknowledgement of the rapturous reception that greeted him, he sat at the grand piano and launched into Northern Muse (Solid Ground), a track from his lesser known 1982 album Beautiful Vision.

Moondance, one of his most famous songs, came next and then he picked up the guitar for I Like It Like That, a song recorded by his original band Them.

With a career spanning almost 50 years, this fiery Belfast singer songwriter has a vast back catalogue to choose from and he picks the set list as he goes along, depending on his mood. Not even the band know what’s coming next and there is always an air of tension in his performances.

It soon became clear that he was in a more reflective mood and he cherry-picked several tracks from his underrated mid-career albums of the late Seventies and Eighties.

These included some of his more spiritual songs: Queen of The Slipstream and The Mystery (both from 1987’s Poetic Champions Compose) and the magnificent track In The Garden from the 1986 album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, an epic song during which Morrison brought the volume of his skin-tight band down so low that you could hear a pin drop before raising the roof again.

And there were even more gems to come - a brilliant version of Into The Mystic from the classic 1970 album Moondance and a superlative rendition of And The Healing Has Begun from 1979’s Into The Music, with Morrison playing some mean electric guitar, slapping his instrument like a man a fraction of his 63 years.

After 90 minutes, Morrison left the stage, having not acknowledged the audience or uttered a word all night.

Before the band had chance to leave the stage, he returned to play some improvised bluesy harmonica before going straight into a raucous version of Gloria, which had the audience to its feet and still dancing as he slipped away again and the lights came up for good, job done.

OK, a tad disappointing if you had paid £80 expecting to hear Astral Weeks, but this was Van Morrison on top form and to see this legendary singer at such close quarters, rather in the large arenas he could play, has to be worth every penny even if he doesn't acknowledge it himself.
-Mark Taylor

Here' Bern's Report:
Still totally blown away this morning - hard to grasp that he did Fair Play, and it was an awesome performance as well. Someone said to me after that they came to hear the voice but the musical ending to that song was fantastic!
Also In the Garden, and a sincere version too. Much chat afterward about the last time he did this live. I recall him saying once that he didn't sing it any more because he no longer believed in god. Foreign Window and Into the Mystery and Slipstream where also big moments for me. This AW stretch is certainly getting him reconnected with some of his best work.

And not one AW song in the 90 minute set!

Van and slimmed down band certainly delivered for me.
-Bern

Correspondent Gordon checks in:

Briefly... a great gig. Solid Ground with Van on piano then Moondance and in no particular order .... a wonderful version of In the game, Fair Play (!!), Queen of the slipstream, The mystery song freom poetic champions (sorry I'm tired... whats your excuse), In the garden, (not played live for a while), A filler Magic time, the one about sleeping on a pallet on the floor in the palace of the lord (brilliant), NGMT (also brilliant), also Into the Mystic, Help me, and a song I could not identify.

That's all for now must chill as I am in work tomorrow - everyone was on a buzz about so many people from all over and that just added to the evening - cheers Van and all Vanatics for a great evening... enjoy Cardiff !!
-Gordon Home "in Bristol"

Setlist :
Nothern Muse (Solid Ground)
Moondance
Fair Play
Foreign Window
The Mystery
Help Me
Have I Told You Lately
All In The Game
In the Garden
Queen of the Slipstream
Into the Mystic
Magic Time
Healing Has Begun
Mystic Eyes/Gloria

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

New US Concerts Announced

Ticketmaster
August 4 – Boston, MA – Wang Theatre

August 6 & 7 – Washington, DC – DAR Constitution Hall

August 8 – Atlantic City, NJ – Caesars Ballroom

Van To Be A 2010 Walk of Fame Honoree

Hollywood Reporter
2010 Walk of Fame honorees revealed

Russell Crowe, Adam Sandler, Bill Maher and Ringo Starr are among the entertainers who will have their names added to Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce announced Wednesday that next year's Walk honorees from the world of motion pictures will be Crowe, Sandler, James Cameron, John Cusack, Colin Firth, Gale Anne Hurd, Alan Menken, Randy Newman, Emma Thompson and Mark Wahlberg.

TV honorees are Maher, Chris Berman, Jon Cryer, Peter Graves, Jimmy Kimmel, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sam Waterston.

Recording artists to be recognized are Starr, Bryan Adams, the Funk Brothers, Alan Jackson, Chaka Khan, Van Morrison, Marco Antonio Solis, ZZ Top and the late Roy Orbison.

Andrea Bocelli and the Cirque du Soleil's Guy Liberte will represent live performance and theater.

Reuters Interview With Van

Reuters
Van Morrison's career almost over before it began

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Van Morrison hates the fame game so much that he would have abandoned his music career 40 years ago if one of his early albums had made him a superstar.

The album in question is his second solo release, "Astral Weeks," which failed to crack the U.S. or British pop charts when it came out in 1968 but is now regarded as one of the greatest musical works of the rock era and is generating new interest more than 40 years since its release.

Undaunted by the initial commercial setback, the Irish soul singer says he "just moved on" to his next project: The 1970 album "Moondance" whose title track is one of his best-known songs.

If "Astral Weeks" had generated the sales commensurate with its eventual stellar status and transformed him into a huge pop star, Morrison is in no doubt about his reaction.

"I would have quit the business had that happened," he said in an email interview with Reuters. "I am not one who has ever taken well to fame and what that attracts. It's a drag. I just wanted to be a songwriter and a singer. I did not bargain for all the rest of it."

Morrison, now 63, has spent his entire career trying to dodge "all the rest of it," in the process becoming one of rock's most unknowable figures. A hugely influential artist who was in turn inspired by Ray Charles and Lonnie Donegan, Morrison has earned a reputation as a grumpy old man and has zero tolerance for showbiz frivolity. He even failed to turn up to his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1993.

FICTIONAL FAVORITE

But Morrison remains proud of "Astral Weeks," which ranks at No. 19 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the greatest albums of all time and is now a steady seller along with the rest of his vast catalog.

The disc, recorded in less than two days in New York City with a jazz quartet assembled by producer Lewis Merenstein, was a marked departure for the singer of the pop hits "Gloria" (with his band Them) and "Brown Eyed Girl."

Morrison had spent years crafting the songs, setting mysterious lyrics referencing his Belfast childhood to multilayered arrangements. The centerpiece of the free-form improvisational effort was "Madame George," a 10-minute tune whose meaning confounds the writer and his fans to this day.

"I was practicing songwriting," he recalled. "Each composition is a fictional story I made up to work on my craft as a songwriter. The rest of the stories people say about my music is fiction as well. I do not tend to write about me. I write about the collective, the collective unconscious."

While many artists of a certain vintage avoid dwelling on their past glories in an effort to show that they are still relevant, Morrison is simply reveling in "Astral Weeks."

To mark its 40th anniversary, he performed the album in its entirety at two shows in Los Angeles last November, and released the fruits on the DVD "Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl," which has just gone on sale exclusively at Amazon.com. A CD was also released through his own EMI-distributed label.

He has also revived "Astral Weeks" at sold-out shows in London and New York City.

Morrison has been accompanied on stage by an orchestral string section as well as a band comprising two of the veterans from the original "Astral Works" sessions. He has also ad-libbed new material to many of his compositions.

"To me it is very forward-looking and, I am told, iconoclastic to have the guts to take a vintage work and take it somewhere else," he said. "Each and every show, I have discovered layers I had not noticed in my lyrics and magic from every crowd."

Morrison said movie studios have expressed a lot of interest in licensing the live recordings. It helps that the vague lyrics can be applied to virtually any situation.

"Any film would be done right by the live versions of these compositions," he said. "Each can tell a story -- whatever story one wants to make of it. This is why when people say 'It's about this or that' I just laugh because that is about the person listening -- not me. These songs trigger things in people's own imaginations. That is their stuff -- not mine."
-Dean Goodman

L.A. Weekly

Van Morrison Goes Astral on The Tonight Show



“I need to know that he’s going to do the three-minute-and-50-second version and not some eight-minute version,” says the Tonight Show talent booker moments after Van Morrison storms off the stage during the run-through for last Wednesday afternoon’s taping. The booker — a stern-looking woman in her 40s with curly, dark hair and thigh-high riding boots — is talking to J.R. Rich, a soft-spoken vice president of publicity for Morrison’s distributor, EMI Music, who calmly assures her that this is the first time anything like this has happened on Morrison’s Astral Weeks Live concert tour, which kicked off at the Hollywood Bowl last November and returned to Los Angeles for a three-night stand at the Orpheum last weekend. Along the way, there have been incident-free television appearances by the normally press-shy singer-songwriter on Regis, Jimmy Fallon and CBS Sunday Morning.

Moments earlier, everything seemed to be going smoothly at The Tonight Show, too, as Morrison led his band in a rendition of “Slim Slow Slider,” a song that clocked in at a mere 3:18 on the 1968 Astral Weeks studio recording, but which has been regularly “stretched out” (Morrison’s preferred term for his stream-of-consciousness improvisations) to three times that length during the Astral Weeks Livesets, making it the most radically transformed of the album’s eight tracks. On the surprisingly small Tonight Show stage, Morrison, outfitted in signature Stetson and shades, straps on the white acoustic guitar he has favored during this tour and starts to play, pausing to give a few shorthand directions to the band (“Something missing, man,” “Too much”). But in an effort to conserve his voice, strained by the previous week’s concerts in Berkeley, Morrison doesn’t sing the song full-out, instead whispering a few key lyrics here and there just to keep everyone on track. When he finishes, the show’s floor director says, “I think you should do that the way you’re gonna do it on the show.” To which Morrison replies, “It’s not a song you can rehearse like that,” and then bolts for his upstairs dressing room, where he will remain until the taping.

It’s almost a scene straight out of Morrison’s song “Showbusiness” — one of many he has written about the perils of fame and the music industry — which begins by describing “the man on the TV with the phony smile” and features a chorus in which the subject is asked to “do it just like the last one.” However, there’s nothing phony about Morrison, who rarely smiles at all — certainly never when he doesn’t mean to — and seems driven by a congenital inability to repeat himself. When he steps in front of a crowd, whether the teeming thousands of the Hollywood Bowl or the peaceful few hundred in NBC Studio 3, he seeks to transcend the apparent boundaries of any given song; to achieve a total freedom of form; to take himself, his band and the audience on a journey whose destination is anything but known.

“You get to the next level, where it’s spontaneous, and you get to the level of being, the being level, like being here and now, whatever you want to call it,” Morrison tells me later in his dressing room, where he’s cooling his heels (literally, in the case of a sore foot he has propped on a hassock) in the company of his tour executive producer, Gigi Lee. Meanwhile, Leno and company move on to rehearse a Celebrity Jeopardy parody that will also be part of the show. “Some people call it meditation,” Morrison continues. “I don’t really like that word either. It’s just creating space, really. It’s the next level up.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s in that meditative space where an unclassifiable give-and-take seems to occur between Morrison, his band and his public; where he instinctively gauges how far into the music they — we — are willing to follow him on any given night, recalibrating midset, even midlyric, at the slightest shifts in the energy of the room. It’s where, when all the stars align, Morrison can seem like the most generous performer who has ever taken to a stage, putting so much of himself into every howl and guttural scat that you fear he might vaporize into thin air. And it’s where Morrison will strip a song we thought we knew down to its component parts and rebuild it — stretch it out — before our very ears, as if he had just figured out how to do so in that very moment, which he very well might have.

That’s not to say that Morrison is incapable of playing a 3:50 version of “Slim Slow Slider” when the occasion calls for it. But what Morrison isn’t is the sort of artist who goes out and plays a song exactly as it sounded on the album. Even the Astral Weeks Live tour, which ostensibly adheres to a more defined template than a typical Morrison show, has proven to be so fluid — with everything from arrangements and song order to the number of musicians in the band changing from one night to the next — that the live album and DVD recorded at the Hollywood Bowl, and released in February, offer only a rough approximation of the shows Morrison has more recently performed in New York, London and Berkeley. The constant has been Morrison himself, who has been playing harder — two hourlong sets a night, separated by an intermission — and more soulfully than he has in years, inviting favorable comparison to the Caledonia Soul Orchestra shows captured on his seminal 1974 live album, It’s Too Late to Stop Now. What’s more, Morrison has rarely seemed to be enjoying himself so much, flashing a broad, toothy grin; cracking up onstage at some unknown private joke at least once per night, usually during “Ballerina”; even occasionally talking to the audience.

“The playing part is okay and the singing part is okay,” Morrison says in typically taciturn fashion back in theTonight Show dressing room, “but the rest of it is pretty much the same thing, having to deal with a lot of people and situations you don’t want to deal with to get this done.” Situations, one assumes, like The Tonight Show itself, where it has now been agreed that the floor director will hold up a cue card during the song to give Morrison a 30-second warning. Not that he ends up needing it. When Morrison finally goes on, following appearances by Tim Allen and Star Trek co-star John Cho, he performs brilliantly, his voice warm and resonant, his fingers strumming the guitar strings violently as he sings the lyric “I start breaking down” — and then, with an almost imperceptible signal to the band, the final chords. Three minutes 50 and not a second more.

There is such a thing as a Van Morrison set list, I discover, when I stop by the next day’s Orpheum sound check, although the neatly typed page of about 20 titles (with a handful of others labeled as “options”) contains several songs that have not been heard at all during the Astral Weeks Live tour and omits several more that Morrison has done at almost every gig. As the band adjourns to dinner, the piano and trumpet player Paul Moran, who has been touring with Morrison for three years now, tells me that the band has to be prepared to play somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 songs at the drop of a hat — or, rather, at a shout from Morrison, who typically calls out the name of the next song he wants to play while the crowd is still applauding the previous one.

“It certainly keeps you on your toes,” adds Jay Berliner, the classically trained guitarist who performed on the original Astral Weeks recording and was “just a little” surprised when Morrison phoned him out of the blue after 40 years to ask if he’d join him on the road. Berliner, a veteran session musician whose very long resumé includes gigs with Jacques Brel and Charles Mingus and three years touring with Harry Belafonte, happily said yes, taking an extended hiatus from his seat in the orchestra of the Broadway revival of Chicago.

Ironically, Berliner says, he barely met Morrison at the 1968 Astral sessions, during which the singer locked himself in the recording booth and only occasionally stuck his head out to give terse instructions to the band. “There was a lot of smoke in the booth — I remember that,” he says with a chuckle. This time around, however, Morrison and Berliner have developed a full-bodied rapport that has been one of the consistent pleasures of the tour, the singer approaching the guitarist multiple times each night and inviting from him imaginative, flamenco-style solos, which, in turn, seem to re-energize Morrison, push him to new heights. Berliner is, in Morrison’s words, someone who “understands what it is, intuitively, and he’s got the background in order to go where he needs to go. As long as you’ve got two or three people who get where you’re going,” he adds, “they can bring the rest along.”

With the Astral Weeks Live tour winding down, Morrison tells me he may take some time off to regroup — something he hasn’t really done since a 1974-76 retreat from the spotlight prompted by his on-again, off-again battle with stage fright. “I’d like to get back to writing — not necessarily songs, just, like, my viewpoints on my experience of being in this, whatever it is,” he says. Does he mean show biz, I ask? “I don’t really know what it is,” he replies. “It’s different things to different people.”

In the meantime, Morrison is electrifying twice more on the Orpheum stage Thursday and Friday (only a flight to Europe prevents me from catching the Saturday show, too). On the first night, he holds forth with a particularly inspired “Sweet Thing” that morphs unexpectedly into the “Burning Ground” track from 1997’s The Healing Game album, making rhythmic knocks on his guitar with his right hand while pressing his harmonica to his lips with his left, singing and knocking and blowing in unison, as if the music were bursting out through his every extremity. Friday, it’s a cover of “Georgia On My Mind” that similarly brings down the house, the song seeming to rise up from so deep inside Morrison that I’m reminded of something he told me during our first interview, in November of last year, about how performing live was akin to baring scars. Which, relatively speaking, makes Morrison’s recent shows something like the concert version of the stigmata.

As Morrison prefaces the Astral Weeks set-closer, “Madame George,” by likening the song to a series of opium-induced hallucinations — “à la Fellini, if you know what I mean” — a couple seated behind me tell me they’ve driven all the way from Tulsa for the three Orpheum concerts and will not go home disappointed. This is the sort of devotion Morrison inspires in his fans and, more often than not, richly rewards. We may come to see him bare his scars, and his soul, but we also come in search of the mysterious healing that he has so often sung about, and which he seems able to find only inside his own music. We come baring our own scars and tattered souls, hopeful that before the curtain falls and the lights go up, that healing will — for him and for us — have begun.
-Scott Foundas