BLUES JUNCTION Productions
7343 El Camino Real
Suite 327
Atascadero, CA 93422-4697
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Way back in 2018 Van Morrison released the 39th and 40th studio albums of his career. They are entitled You’re Driving Me Crazy and The Prophet Speaks. He was backed by Hammond B3 giant Joey DeFranscesco and his great band on both of these releases. Morrison has been so successful for so long that he is sometimes easy to take for granted. I resist this notion and embrace the music of Van the Man. I let it wash over me and seep into my soul.
I could have very easily and without reservation or apology put either one or both of these two recordings in my Top 40 Albums of 2018 which appears in our annual “Best of…” edition of BLUES JUNCTION. However, I didn’t want to squeeze out an underpublicized musician for a world-wide musical icon like Van Morrison. Hell, the cat has even been knighted and that’s a big deal in some parts of the world. The one, two punch from this fighting Irishman seems like just the right time to bring Van the Man into the JUNCTION.
Morrison treats the blues and jazz like that comfortable domicile to which you return time and time again. Regardless of his widely varied musical journeys, Morrison always finds his way back home. When he does, I’m there to greet him at the door. Both 2018 releases are steeped in blues, jazz and for lack of a better description, Van Morrison music. Everything the Belfast Cowboy touches receives his unique brand. These two new albums are no exception.
The first of these two albums to be released You’re Driving me Crazy has DeFranscesco receiving co-billing. It may be the more jazz tinged of the two releases with more of a nod given to the blues dialect in his second 2018 offering which came out on December 7th of last year. However, I don’t make a big distinction between blues and jazz as it applies to Morrison’s music any more than I do while visiting the recordings of Jimmie Witherspoon in my library, just to site one example. The place where jazz and blues cavort is one of my favorite types of music. When Morrison and his musical sensibilities join this party…well then things get even more crazy mixed up and I love it. On these two albums he blends his original music with interpretations and adaptations from the blues canon.
I suppose by now most folks have heard the music of Van Morrison. For huge segments of our population that means they are at least familiar with the half a dozen or so Morrison tunes that have remained on classic-rack radio formats for decades now, but there is more…so much more to Van Morrison than meets these ears.
While listening to You’re Driving Me Crazy and The Prophet Speaks, it occurred to me how little Morrison’s approach to the quintessential American music has changed. It’s all here, including Morrison’s jazz vocalese which often sounds like trying to start a 64’ Ford Fairlane that has run out of gas or Mel Torme with the hiccups, trying to sneeze. All of this might be an acquired taste, but with Morrison it just comes with the territory.
On these 2018 releases, Morrison returns to his comfort zone by surrounding himself with the best, or his favorite, musicians which are often one and the same. He gives them all the space they need to do their thing and in the spirit of the greatest blues and jazz ensembles, they work as a team striving to attain a mutual vision.
These new recordings sent me back into my Van Morrison catalogue in an effort to connect the dots and see how this 74-year-old has remained, fresh, relevant, full of verve and deliver not one, but two exemplary albums well into his sixth decade in the music business
I went into the library and began my journey through the music of Van Morrison. I started in the mid 1960’s with the band Them out of Northern Ireland. It is a compilation CD that came out in 1987 entitled Them featuring Van Morrison. This particular platter consists of thirteen songs from this band.
Listening to this material for the first time in literally decades it reminded me how bad blues can be in the wrong hands…in this case very young Irish lads. Them was foisted onto the American public as part of the so called British Invasion. Like many of these acts, it was the blues that inspired this band. Earnest young men in love with the real thing felt so moved by this African-American art form that they wanted to play it as best they could. Most, not surprisingly, weren’t very good at it. They…Them was no exception.
Their interpretation of the Big Joe Williams tune Baby Please Don’t Go was a minor radio hit. It is a fun romp through some young men’s blues. From a blues perspective it goes mostly downhill from there. Bobby Bland’s Turn On Your Love Light is laughable and a really bad choice. T-Bone’s Stormy Monday and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Got a Spell On You are only slightly better. The latter did receive some welcome nuanced sensitivity that is almost always absent in the interpretations of this material by Caucasians during this period.
However, there were a few hints that Van Morrison would become the most intriguing and certainly the most prolific figure to emerge from this British rock and blues scene of the 1960’s.
Starting with the song, Gloria…it is the standout track on the album, a Morrison original and one of the greatest rock&roll tunes of that or any other era. Gloria is a two minute and forty-one second, sexually charged mini opera. It has a pulse pounding riff that explodes into an orgasmic spelling bee before settling back down into a tension laden groove. The song has become a garage band anthem for the ages.
The recording of a Bert Burns tune Here Comes The Night was also a hit and more importantly showed Burns, a key music impresario, songwriter, producer and visionary that Morrison was worthy of more. The two would collaborate in 1967 on Morrison’s huge hit Brown Eyed Girl, which Burns would produce. The single came out on Burns’ Bang label. However, Burns association with mobsters would serve as an inspiration for some of Morrison’s bitterness through the years and become fodder for a song off his 1993 album Too Long In Exile entitled Big Time Operators.
Looking back there was another clue. It was the song Don’t Look Back written by John Lee Hooker. Hooker and Morrison, two musicians separated by a generation and an ocean, had met a year earlier and became fast friends. Their careers would cross paths several times through the years. Hooker is Morrison’s single biggest vocal influence.
After the pop tune, Brown Eyed Girl became a huge international hit, Morrison used the capital bestowed upon him in the music business to launch an adventurous career where his first stop would be his highly acclaimed 1968 album, Astral Weeks. It has been hailed as one of the greatest albums of the rock era. Astral Weeks is a lot of things; “rock” is not one of them. The album has been written about to death. Most of the fawning over this work quite frankly falls above my pay grade. Yet, I think it is safe to say that it was Morrison’s first trip into the mystic.
His follow up work has Morrison returning to earth and a work that would come to define him as much as Astral Weeks. His 1970 album Moondance has the newly anointed poetic, shaman of the slipstream, finding his groove and applying his deft touch to rhythm & blues, as well as jazz, soul and country music. It was a wildly popular affair that bought Morrison permanent rock icon status.
Yet, he used his lofty position in this industry to reject the commercial trappings of the music business for most of the next 58 years and counting. He didn’t look like a rock star and made no concessions to show business on or off the stage. To his great credit, Morrison never wallowed in the nostalgic excesses which is the downfall of rock stars of this era. While that would be a no brainer and easy money, this particular Irish rover never went that route. Morrison was only interested in what’s happening now and what’s happening next. That old John Lee Hooker song Don’t Look Back became his mantra. He followed his muse wherever it took him and that often-led right back to rhythm & blues.
In 1972 he joined his old friend John Lee Hooker and sang on his album Never Get Out of The Blues Alive. Hooker even sang the Van Morrison tune T.B. Sheets on the record. Morrison would continue to record album after album of original material which yielded an occasional hit song in the 70’s.
His live performances revealed another side of his musical persona…the blues. His first live album Too Late to Stop Now is a fine example of this. Backed by an ensemble called The Caledonia Soul Orchestra, Morrison and the band take on songs by Ray Charles, Bobby Bland and Willie Dixon as well as two numbers penned by Mack Rice, aka Sonny Boy Williamson 2, which appear on this very well received 1975 double live album.
Morrison would often have world class blues men open and perform with him while on tour. This trend continued throughout his career. Junior Wells, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bobby Bland and John Lee Hooker of course, as well as a host of others didn’t help sell tickets, but Morrison could expose his large audiences to names of which they were likely not familiar and help put some money in the pockets of these deserving artists. Many of these musicians’ careers got derailed mid-stream by the British Invasion in which Morrison found himself years earlier. It was his way of returning the favor and making amends for the upside-down music business that found himself on the top and his heroes on the bottom.
Blues and soul men from his side of the pond also got swept away by Morrison and his muse. Off and on, he would employ Georgie Fame from England. Fame, twelve-years Morrison’s senior, had already established himself as a star in the burgeoning British rhythm & blues scene long before America needed invading. The vocalist, pianist and organist would become an integral part of his live performances through the years.
In the 1990’s Morrison would employ a young English musician, James Hunter. The uber-talented soul-blues vocalist and guitarist performs on Morrison’s wonderful live album, 1994’s A Night In San Francisco. This double live album is an absolute tour de force and shows that twenty years after Too Late to Stop Now, Van Morrison and his ensemble can still turn in absolutely ground-breaking live recordings that are thrilling. Like his previous double live album, huge swaths of the performance are turned over to rhythm & blues.
There was a time when Morrison didn’t find what he was grasping for nearly often enough although one has to applaud his effort for trying so desperately. After nearly a decade of floundering around searching for some kind of spiritual redemption, inspiration or both, he would bounce back in the 90’s.
It was a period of prolific output by Morrison who just wouldn’t take his foot off the gas. One wildly eclectic album after another came flooding out focusing on his blues and jazz output highlights, starting with the 1990 “Best of…” put together and arranged by Morrison. The album demonstrates how, even in the first 25 years of this massive career, rhythm & blues was central to the vision of Van Morrison. His big hits stand shoulder to shoulder with lesser known tunes, bringing new energy to his back catalog.
1993’s Too Long in Exile reunites Morrison with John Lee Hooker and George Fame. Exile is a personal favorite. 1995’s How Long Has This Been Going On: With Georgie Fame & Friends was recorded live at Ronnie Scotts. The album has Morrison fronting a big band who take on jazz material live at the famous London nighclub sans an audience.
From there Morrison collaborates with Fame and another long-time side man, horn arranger and former member of the 1960’s James Brown Band, Pee Wee Ellis. They join forces with Mose Allison on the 1996 album called Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison. Allison spent a lifetime being called a jazz musician by blues people and a blues musician by jazz buffs. It is that spot that Morrison occupies in his spare time. The Irishman had spent his entire adult life admiring the music of Allison, a Mississippi native and the man, who much like Morrison, is an entire genre unto himself.
Van Morrison lends some vocals and gravitas by returning the favor and singing on James Hunter’s 1996 release…Believe What I Say. Hunter and his great band offer Morrison another crack at Bland’s Lovelight. They nail it.
In 1997, John Lee Hooker released the album Don’t Look Back. It might be my favorite album from Hooker’s incredible 90’s late career renaissance. The album, which was co-produced by Morrison, has him singing four duets with Hooker. The octogenarian even sang a Morrison original entitled The Healing Game.
Morrison had hired the great West Coast blues legend Charles Brown and his band to back up Hooker and himself on many of the tracks heard on Don’t Look Back. Brown’s band leader, guitarist Danny Carron channels the guitar stylings of Johnny Moore to great effect. Very few people, Morrison being among them, could imagine blues men as disparate as Brown and Hooker working together and fewer still could imagine such spectacular results. It had to be one of the last times, if not the very last time, Charles Brown was ever in a recording studio. He died a year and half later of congestive heart failure. Brown’s 1946 hit Drifting Blues has been a concert staple for Morrison for decades by now.
John Lee Hooker, with whom Morrison identified with as much as any blues man, passed away on June 21, 2001.
Morrison greeted the new millennium as if nothing had changed. His 2002 album, Down the Road, was a huge success and featured mostly original material. He continued to make genre hopping albums and started to do some maintenance of his legacy and back catalogue.
A handful of “Best of…” and live albums would follow. There was a release of familiar tunes on a 2007 album entitled Van Morrison At the Movies – Soundtrack Hits. In 2015 he released Duets: A Reworking of the Catalogue.
In 2017, he offered up a blues-oriented album called Roll with the Punches which isn’t marred by the guitar playing of Jeff Beck, who shows that he doesn’t always have to sound like a ridiculous, over indulgent wanker all the time. This was followed up by the Morrison jazz album entitled Versatile, which came out in December of 2017. These albums, as good as they were, only hinted at the at the greatness that would be brought forth in 2018.
On You’re Driving Me Crazy and The Prophet Speaks it is the small jazz combo of Joey DeFrancesco which makes these albums so special. “Joey D” is third generation jazz man from Philadelphia. He is 47 years old and has been playing organ since he was four. He is also an accomplished trumpet player. By the time he was a teenager he was a staple on the east coast jazz scene.
He is the undisputed heir apparent of the “Big Boss Man” of the B3, Jimmie Smith with whom he has performed and recorded. DeFrancesco has also recorded with jazz giants Illinois Jacquet, Jimmy Cobb, Elvin Jones, Arturo Sandoval, Houston Person, Coni Candoli, Ricky Woodard, George Benson, George Coleman, Bobby Hutcherson, James Moody and others. He naturally has performed with his father, Papa John DeFrancesco, a highly respected B3 player in his own right. Joey D also recorded with a couple of cats named Miles Davis and Ray Charles. He has on occasion backed up a lesser known jazz vocalist named Joe Dogs, who is in fact better known as an actor named Joe Pesci. So, by the time Van Morrison came calling it is likely that Joey D was up to the task and not the least bit intimidated by the reputation and stature of this musical icon.
The two get on like they have been at each other’s side for their entire lives. Even though these kindred spirits come from entirely different backgrounds, they are coming from the same place. Joey D is 25 years the junior of Morrison and kind of reminds me of the latter’s relationship with John Lee Hooker in this respect.
Some of my favorite moments in these two new albums comes from the interplay between DeFrancesco’s B3 and Morrison’s sax playing. While listening to Van the Man play anything, especially the tenor or alto sax, you realize he plays just like he sings. You can hear the same often gravelly Irish soul spill out from his horn. It has been said that the human voice is the ultimate instrument. Morrison imbues every instrument he picks up and sings through it. It the ultimate in human emotive expression.
It is why we love the blues played at its very best and why we love the music of Van Morrison. These two most recent albums by Van Morrison rank among the very best in this long and fruitful career. I realize how selfish it would be to ask any more of Van Morrison, but here is a toast that he continues to make more compelling music before his soul and spirit fly into the mystic.
- David Mac
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BLUES JUNCTION Productions
7343 El Camino Real
Suite 327
Atascadero, CA 93422-4697
info