Millions of people in the English-speaking world pick up a guitar, sit down at the piano or take up some other instrument to sing and play songs of their own devising. Thousands of them are good enough to get people to pay them for it, and some subset of those get put on record and sold or streamed to legions of fans. But only a bare few of them are game-changers: Those sui generis artists who synthesize all of their influences and combine them with their own vision to create something startling and new. To this august assemblage that includes names like Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, you have to add Sir George Ivan “Van” Morrison.
The Northern Irish singer and songwriter has spent the past 50 years fusing American jazz, pop, blues, soul and rhythm & blues with Anglo-Irish folk music to create something that’s been dubbed Celtic Soul. The Essential is a two-disc, 37-track collection from Sony Legacy celebrates that half-century of song, as part of a huge new reissue project.
On the basis of the first disc, it’s clear not only that Morrison had a superlative string of hits but that he was creating art, at least of the pop variety. Starting with the proto-punk anthem “Gloria” with his group Them in 1965 and moving on to an incredibly prolific solo career, here are a batch of recognized hits: “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Moondance,” “Crazy Love,” “And It Stoned Me,” “Domino,” “Wild Night,” “Tupelo Honey,” “Jackie Wilson Said,” “Caravan.” The Moondance album made Morrison a star, producing six recognizable hits, going triple platinum in the U.S. and charting in the top 50 all over Europe. And as popular as Moondance and his other early singles were with the public, his debut, the soulful concept album/song cycle Astral Weeks was a huge hit with the critics. What was this music? Jazz, pop, soul, rock, Irish folk? A little bit of all of that and more. This collection includes the title song and, oddly, “The Way That Young Lovers Do,” the track that doesn’t seem to fit sonically or thematically with the rest of the album. On its own, at this remove, though, it’s a strong contender, and obviously of a piece with the jazzy, romantic, nostalgic Celtic soul in which Morrison was to specialize for the next 40 years.
Common wisdom is that nearly everything Morrison put to wax through the end of the 1970s is classic, and the rest is hit or miss — nearly all of the ’80s output can be skipped, though things pick up occasionally starting in the ’90s.
The first disc ends with a rollicking live version of “Cleaning Windows” from 1982’s It’s All In the Game — not essential but not embarrassing. And the first couple on Disc 2 also stand up — “Bright Side Of The Road” and “And The Healing Has Begun” from 1979’s Into the Music, his last of the ’70s and an album that charted respectably. But then true to the common wisdom, nothing is very compelling again until 1990’s Enlightenment. From that we have two good songs, the title track and the R&B rave-up “Real Real Gone,” Featuring Georgie Fame on Hammond organ. The rest of the disc is pretty solid, from the solid soul of “Days Like This” and “Rough God Goes Riding” to the country shuffle of “Playhouse” from his 2006 album of country covers and especially the 1966 Frank Sinatra hit “That’s Life.” I was no big Sinatra fan but this single from my school years caught my fancy, and Morrison and Georgie Fame do it up proud, lounge-like with a bit of New Orleans to it.
The second disc ends with a lovely live version of “Sweet Thing,” and I’d be remiss to not mention that the version of “Caravan” toward the end of the first disc features The Band, from their farewell concert recording The Last Waltz.
The compilers at Legacy have done a pretty solid job of capturing the essence of Van Morrison’s career and his contributions to pop music. For those who know only the Classic Rock radio hits, this is a good place to start broadening your knowledge of Morrison’s songbook, so you can look through the list of newly reissued releases and decide which appeal most to you.
(Sony Legacy, 2015)
