Van Morrison began his recording career half a century ago as a teenager with Them. A couple of that band’s biggest hits open the two-disc Essential. “Gloria” remains remarkable for its brazen simplicity, hungrily reinventing blues as powerful rock music in an ecstatic narrative of sexual experience. Many of his contemporaries faded quickly into repetition but Morrison moved on, as demonstrated by much of what follows on Essential as well as a pair of classic albums reissued on CD with alternate takes as bonus tracks.
Morrison’s solo career had already begun, but he considered Astral Weeks (1968) as his genesis. By that time he was well underway to inventing his own kind of soul music, and his lyrics were blossoming into poetry. Morrison recorded Astral Weeks in New York in a few quick takes with several of the city’s finest jazz sidemen. The résumés of his accompanists include Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Kenny Burrell and the Modern Jazz Quartet. They received no instruction from their impromptu bandleader but like good jazzmen on stage, improvised and created enduring performances in the moment. Astral Weeks was an acoustic session, its themes of romantic, erotic and spiritual love flowing easily from song through song.
His Band and the Street Choir (1970) was characteristic of his peak years during the new decade as an AM hitmaker and continual presence on FM. With the joyous opening number, “Domino,” Morrison brought his reinvention of 1950s R&B fully to life. Down to earth thematically, the album was distinct for its many-layered influences, incorporating jazz and echoes of doo-wop and gospel. The album’s best-known song, “Blue Money,” remains an irresistibly rhythmic tour de force of classic R&B, yet entirely contemporary in its time.
