Music
With his third album in 15 months, Van Morrison offers an unsentimental take on a selection of jazz classics
Album reviews, plus Jim Gilchrist on the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra’s Spirit of Light seasonal concert
On stage in Glasgow a few weeks ago, Van Morrison ripped through a no-filler set like he had a train to catch. Versatile is his third album release in 15 months. Has he laid a who-can-cover-the-moststandards wager with Rod Stewart and Bob Dylan? And dare it be said that the famously gruff Sir Van is having the musical time of his life aged 72? His previous album, Roll with the
Punches, on which he delivered a mix of covers and originals with a predominantly rhythm’n’blues slant, is barely two months old and now he repeats the model with his equally beloved jazz, taking on Gershwin and Porter with barely a pause to loosen his collar and tipping the trilby to Sinatra in his louche delivery of The Party’s Over.
Affirmation, with James Galway on flute, is an easy listening instrumental
to drift away on, A Foggy Day and Makin’ Whoopee are songs to snuggle up to over Christmas; more unexpected is his own smooth
saxophone arrangement of the Skye
Boat Song.
Nestling contentedly in this company are a handful of relaxed, feelgood originals. Morrison stirs in some blues on Take It Easy Baby, applies Bacharach-style horns to the swing number Start All
Over Again, playfully imitates the eponymous Broken Record and, in his unsentimental way, captures a mix of agony and ecstasy on I Forgot That
Love Existed.
The Rolling Stones returned to their rhythm’n’blues roots with reasonable virility on their 2016 covers collection
Blue & Lonesome. The Rolling Stones
–Onair, a compilation of early radio appearances on such BBC shows as
Saturday Club, Top Gear and Yeah Yeah, is a reminder of how they attacked the canon as hungry young men.
Chuck Berry favourites, including their debut single Come On, feature heavily, while Bo Diddley’ scopsand
Robbers is dispatched with nefarious swagger and a pretty convincing American accent from Mick Jagger. But it also documents their nascent ability to mine a tradition for their own ends – witness the alacrity with which Jagger delivers The Spider and
the Fly.
The rock’n’roll hoopla came later but the raw live take of It’s All Over Now from a 1964 edition of The Joe
Loss Pop Show showcases the no-frills impact the Stones could make in their cub years.
Glaswegian brother/sister act
David and Katie Pope, aka The Just
Joans, were last heard round these parts on their 2006 debut Last Tango in Motherwell. You Might Be Smiling Now picks up the trail with a tempered mix of twee indie pop, guttural melancholy and a dry sense of humour on tracks such as You Make Me Physically Sick (Let’s Start Having Children), capturing what David describes as “the confusion in my teenage years, the horror of my twenties and the terror of my encroaching middle age.” What listener of a certain age cannot identify with that? Meanwhile, his sister’s finest interjection is Caledonian country ballad confessional Ionlysmokewheni
Drink.
Willie Campbell, onetime frontman of Glasgow-based indie pop band Astrid, now records as The Open Day Rotation from his home base on Lewis. New Clouds In Motion is a warmly crafted collection drawing on a number of intersecting traditions from the country soul of New Eyes of Gold to wistful folk lament Winter
Late in Spring. I’ve Got A Kite sounds like a lost Teenage Fanclub track – so far so familiar, until Campbell adds a surprise blast of E Street Band sax to
Going Through the Motions.
“It’s a reminder of how the Rolling Stones attacked the canon as hungry young men”