The once and future classic
Van Morrison is a notoriously spotty
live performer—irascible, easily bored, hard-headed and
occasionally brilliant. It’s Too Late to Stop Now is an
early-career (1974) live masterpiece, but Van’s last concert
recording—1994’s One Night in San Francisco—found him
curiously uninvolved, turning over many of the vocal duties to his
back-up singers. Fortunately, Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood
Bowl reveals a newly energized Van at the top of his game, fully
engaged in the proceedings, and ready and able to sail into the
mystic.
Updating and reconceptualizing one of
the most beloved albums of all time was surely a daunting task. Van
had never performed Astral Weeks, his breakthrough 1968
singer/songwriter album, in its entirety. And so he used the 40th
anniversary of his impressionistic song cycle to dust off these
venerable tunes before an appreciative L.A. audience. Recorded over
two nights in November 2008, this reworked and re-ordered Astral
Weeks is, by turns, comfortingly familiar and bracingly fresh and
new. Recruiting original guitarist Jay Berliner and a bevy of string
and horn session players, Morrison attempted to recapture the loose,
improvisational nature of the original recordings. He practiced with
the band precisely twice, and then hit the stage.
It could have been a disaster, but it’s
not. Following Morrison’s every lead, the band exhibits all the
hallmarks of the finest jazz ensembles. More miraculously, the loose
song structures provide ample opportunity for Morrison to stretch out
vocally, and on improvisational workouts such as the title track,
“Cyprus Avenue,” and “Madame George,” Morrison moans, scats,
cajoles and finally soars off in electrifying directions. When he’s
on (and he’s on here most of the time), he’s one of the most
gifted, idiosyncratic soul singers ever, and it’s a treat to hear
him, at this late stage, recapture his former glory. As an added
bonus, Morrison tacks on parts of “Listen to the Lion” and
“Summertime in England,” two early songs not originally part of
Astral Weeks, but very much of a piece with the fluid chamber
music of the original album. This is Morrison the mystic poet,
pushing and prodding his band to greatness. “Magnificently we will
flow,” he sang once, almost 40 years ago. And so they do.