Jazz, Soul & the Sound of Pure Transcendence

By the time the 23-year-old Van Morrison arrived in New York City to record Astral Weeks, he had already scored hits on both sides of the Atlantic with “Gloria” and “Brown-Eyed Girl.” The world expected something special — what they got was something altogether beyond expectation. Recorded in an extraordinary two days with a core of talented jazz stalwarts, Morrison gave the musicians minimal direction and let on almost nothing about the meaning of his lyrics, instead scatting over the band’s largely improvised instrumentals and conjuring something utterly unlike anything that had come before.

The result was lyrically oblique, poetic, and deeply personal in a way that defied easy categorisation — part jazz, part folk, part stream-of-consciousness soul. “Madame George” is a heartfelt, smudged-pastel flight of fantasy about a Belfast drag artist, painted with the texture of a half-remembered dream, while “Sweet Thing” is an electrifying love song that raises the hairs on your neck from the very first strum. Though the album met a poor commercial reception on release, critics then and since have recognised the genius of Morrison’s startling achievement — Astral Weeks regularly troubles the very upper reaches of the greatest albums ever made.

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)