Van Morrison - Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl
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Free Music Notes for Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl
Free Music Review: Van Morrison - Astral Weeks to Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl
Hit: 5 Stars
Do you remember the first time you heard Van Morrison's Astral Weeks? Did you lie back in the darkness, hearing Van Morrison play jazz, with horns and flutes; vibes and strings; bluesy folk vocals with acoustic guitars and bass? It was something else - not rock, not pop - it was music that made you listen to the poetry in the lyrics, and feel the real emotion in Morrison's singing. It had a powerful effect on me and changed the rhythms running in my head and the music that I played. My friends and I were listening to Cream, the Beatles, the Grass Roots, Sly And The Family Stone, starting to veer away from the mainstream music, but this album was very, very different. We didn't know what a song cycle was, but we liked it. The LP came out in 1968 - before Moondance (1970) and His Band And Street Choir (1970) made him a big star with hits like Moondance and Domino putting him on the pop charts. We knew him for Gloria (with Them) and Brown Eyed Girl, but when we first experienced Astral Weeks, it was magic and poetry and cosmic all rolled into one. The album has been a critical success and consistently been on the various Greatest Albums Of All Time lists since it came out, although it never charted a hit. One of the songs from the album, Madam George, is included in The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame's list of 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll.
Could you find me / Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down / In silence easy
To be born again (Astral Weeks, 1968)
Forty years later, in 2008, Van has recorded a live version of Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl, extending the beauty and mystery of the original, to be born again by adding his decades of experience with love and life to the youthful passions that were so much the heart of 1968 recording. It's still a song cycle, but he's added new songs and re-ordered the original set to give us a new view of a classic work. I'll leave it to the technical reviewers to give you a breakdown the list of musicians and songs, with just the comment that Jay Berliner plays lead guitar with Van on the live recording, just as he did on the original. The vibes, flutes and strings still jam behind the vocals and guitar, looser than the first album, but I think that's what the four decades of living with the music have allowed Morrison to bring to the live concert. Listening to the live concert sent me back to the roots of 1968's version - kicking in some of the passion of the time, bringing back the memories of what I was listening to back then and the impact the music had and has on me. It's well worth the trip - check it out for yourself.
The original Astral Weeks was Morrison's first album for Warner Brothers Records, this latest is on his own label, Listen To The Lion. Released in February of 2009, on CD, DVD and vinyl LP, the recording has done pretty well on the Amazon charts #6 for Live Albums, #237 in Music.
Free Music Review: Reincarnation?
Hit: 5 Stars
Some artists, like Miles, make a career out of never looking back. Others, like Van, spent their entire career looking backwards. In the case of the first Astral Weeks, Morrison looked to the jazz and blues foundations he embraced in Belfast as a kid. Belfast, like the American South, was a place of prejudicial violence amidst unrelenting poverty. For Morrison, his anglo-Irish soul sought escape and took flight in references that blended Yeats with John Lee Hooker. Freed from a record deal that sought to make him another Brill Building hack, he launched Astral Weeks and a career that advanced as it sought refuge in the fertile ground of his imagination's influences. Mostly, over the past 40+ years, it's been exhilarating.
With the demise of the Georgie Fame led band of the mid Nineties, Morrison was a bit by the numbers and somewhat rote in his efforts. A 3 pm concert one Sunady a couple of years back in Philly displayed a perfunctory approach to his own cannon that left one feeling that there was no commitment to this anymore. So, imagine the surprise when this arrived. I thought that perhaps he had run out of past ideas to mine and just figured on starting all over again. That displays a certain cynical contempt for the punters, an attitude Van has exhibited on occasion. Instead what arrived was a profound reconsideration of how he began, and one can only hope that by touching base here, he once again taps that raw nerve that lit him up throughout most of his career. This is not simply a revision. This performance comes with the ravages of time and the road. To wit, songs like "The way young lovers do" has an edge and a warning to it that would not have been possible when he was a young man. "Madam George" has the dignity of Yeats, worldly wise and compassionate for all the slings and arrows. "Sweet Thing" is almost too heartbreakingly beautiful.
This is an amazing accomplishment. At the end of his life, in Montreux with Chaka Khan and Wallace Roney and Kenny Garrett, Miles took a fleeting look back at where and how he began. It was almost too painfully beautiful. There would not be enough time for Miles to glance more than fleetingly so. The Muses willing, let's hope Van has the time and inspiration to continue to mine the Celtic Twilight where only souls shine. His aura on this one is just beautiful.
Free Music Review: There is a gem....although doesn't compare to the original.
Hit: 5 Stars
It was the late 90s that I discovered Astral Weeks, and I have been playing it since! It is simply amazing; my go-to-the-grave CD. But when Astral Weeks came out in the late 60s, I was listening to Brown Eyed Girl, Gloria, and Here Comes the Night. Never would mainstream radio have played Astral Weeks. And since I didn't have stereo sound then, I may not have enjoyed it. Plus, I would have said: what the hell is all that about?
This collection is great mainly because Morrison brought back this wonderful collection. To me, Morrison's live stuff is always different from his studio formats. Sometimes it is astounding what he does. I love the entire CD, although I believe, he doesn't reach the high notes like the original album. He still evokes plenty of ranges. I love to hear some of his sounds, including the gruffness and even the mumbles. You will still here some of those instruments familiar in the original. I like the bluesy jazzy sound of this. There are added/if not extra tunes accompanied to the Astral Weeks songs.
The gem song song here?
The last song, an extra one that is not on the original Astral Weeks is Common One, a fovorite where the sax player does an echo of Morrison's lyrics. Listen to the part where his voice acts like an instrument and the sax emulates that.
I don't have the name of the player who does the duo with Morrison, but it is something to see if you have the DVD. But if you don't have the live DVD, you can see this particular song Common One on Van Morrison, The Concert [VHS]a live concert filmed in New York in 1989. (Don't think it is on DVD).
Still, I could listen to this often, but it will never replace the original Astral Weeks that I heard hundreds of times. ....Rizzo
Free Music Review: Transcendence
Hit: 5 Stars
Most rock fans would have Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" on their list of the best 10 or 20 albums ever recorded. Recorded in just two days, it fused rock and jazz into something completely new. As I wrote in my review of that album, it's a song cycle that never fails to cheer me up, that never grows old, that never fails to give me something new, even after hundreds of listenings.
Forty years later - forty years! - Van performed "Astral Weeks" live at the Hollywood Bowl, the first time, ever, he has performed the entire album live.
It's superb. From the first bars of the title cut, with the ageless Jay Berliner again on guitar, playing counter melody to David Hayes' bass, I was entranced. The wildly enthusiastic audience helps, too. This is a great artist revisiting his seminal work, and finding new meanings and new interpretation.
Van Morrison concerts are dicey. He has a rocky relationship with his audience. He has an even worse attitude towards his band. More than once he has walked off stage in a huff. But sometimes he transcends himself. As great as he is in the studio, there are times he can be even better live. This was one of them.
If you don't like jazz-inflected rock; if you want thrashed heavy metal; try someone else. If you want superb acoustic music that is still influencing artists 40 years later, this is an album for you. If you know and love the 1968 album, you're going to enjoy hearing a forty-year older Van revisit those songs, still improvising, still growling through "Listen to the Lion," still glissading through notes. Still telling us,
And I will never grow so old again
And I will walk and talk in the gardens all wet with rain
Oh, sweet thing, sweet thing
Free Music Review: Van Goes Home Again - A Triumph Coming Ever So Close to the Original
Hit: 5 Stars
As a life long Beatles fan (born the year they disbanded), I thought that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the greatest album of all time, until I heard Astral Weeks, which I immediately thought was TWICE as good. This revelation spawned a purchasing of the entire Van collection THEM through the present and still going. I was a little skeptical about a re-doing the greatest, most intimate album ever recorded, but then the early critic reviews started to come in and I couldn't wait to pick this up. The record is different to say the least, but somehow, amazingly, nearly as good. Perhaps something changes about a person, for me 20 years after hearing the original, and Van 40 years after recording it, but I'm able to follow him through the changes. I thought Weeks was something Van knew he could never achieve again and something he had put out of his mind for good. What is most shocking for me with the Live record is that Van is still intimately familiar with these songs, like he's been listening to the disk himself for the last 40 years like we have. He even improvs some lyrics on Cyprus Avenue changing "Leaf on a Tree" to a more playful "Jelly on a Plate", but you can tell he is in complete control of his 40 year old possession. All Van's records are 3 stars or up for me, but he's only hit the 5 star mark about 4 times in 40 years, usually content to just put one or two brilliant moments on a record. At the age of 62, at least for me, Van has returned to 5 star form by being gutsy enough to try to tackle his best effort, again. If Weeks is a 100 out of 100, Weeks Live is 97 out of 100.