She was fiery-voiced and potent, and somewhat unexpectedly she took the roof off. When Patti Smith reperformed Horses in London in 2005 she began (of course) with “Gloria,” her visionary expansion of the 1964 Them hit, her strange tribute to Van. Studio walls separate them, as well as some never-explained reluctance on the part of the singer to offer any direction at all to his musicians: Most accounts have Van sealed off, raving privately in his recording booth while the unflappable jazzers outside just do it.Īs his tubes warm up, though, and as he works his changes upon the words “I just don’t know what to do/ I just don’t know what to do,” “Slim Slow Slider” becomes rather gorgeous. One imagines Van and the band in an inspired folk-bop huddle, eye to eye, melding minds at high temperatures, but apparently not. In the studio, ecstasy happens: Davis and Kay set up a cross-flutter of bass and cymbal, a kind of hallucinated skiffle, that will become the nervous system of Astral Weeks. His new songs are weird-straggling, open-ended raptures, almost gibberish some of them, about 14-year-old girls and railroad bridges in Belfast. But then, Van, as Merenstein has intuited, is about to become an unrock star. Rather an unrock crew for a session with Van Morrison, performer of the bouncy “ Brown-Eyed Girl” and recent graduate from mad-dog beat combo Them. Bassist Richard Davis has played with Eric Dolphy and Ahmad Jamal drummer Connie Kay is from the Modern Jazz Quartet Jay Berliner, on guitar, is a Mingus man. He finds a group of crack session men, the cream of the contemporary jazz scene, assembled there by producer Lew Merenstein. Against the stream of time, or in its slipstream to be precise, Van Morrison in 1968 goes into a New York studio.

Van morrison astral weeks full album