VANNO: THE MOVIE
One of the smartest things Martin Scorsese did in The King Of. Comedy was bracket it with songs by Ray Charles and Van Morrison. The movie may have had a chilly souilessness, but at either end there were voices that virtually define soul. There’s a direct line between Charles and Morrison, and it’s very evident on A Sense Of Wonder, a record that comes at you with a clear sense of purpose.
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VANNO: THE MOVIE
VAN MORRISON A Sense Of Wonder (Mercury)
Mitchell Cohen
One of the smartest things Martin Scorsese did in The King Of. Comedy was bracket it with songs by Ray Charles and Van Morrison. The movie may have had a chilly souilessness, but at either end there were voices that virtually define soul. There’s a direct line between Charles and Morrison, and it’s very evident on A Sense Of Wonder, a record that comes at you with a clear sense of purpose. It’S freer of ambiguous detours than Morrison’s music has been in a while: the liner notes, whose narrative harkens back to the crypticfable approach of Moondance and Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, are about as off-center as this gets.
In a lot of ways, the album is a typical ’80s Morrison mix: a couple of instrumentals (one is like Irish-cowboy movie music, aided by Moving Hearts; the other has strains of Japanese music, Windham Hill yuppie-jazz, and Keith Jarrett), poetic references (Van reads, in a rather perfunctory manner, a bit of William Blake, and the lead-off cut is called “Tore Down A La Rimbaud”), spiritual quests and salvation. It’s literate, it’s heartfelt, it even swings. And you don’t have to share Morrison’s devotion to get drawn in.
Take “His Master’s Eyes” as case in point. As Brother Ray practically invented modern R&B by secularizing gospel, making possible not only Sam Cooke but much fof Motown, Morrison continues comingling the spiritual and the worldly. On “His Master’s Eyes,” he works a Stax-Voltish arrangement (slow-building horns, clean, bluesy guitar) around a melody that’s reminiscent of “Bring It On Home To Me,” and sings with a wonderful conviction. So if Morrison wants to croon about his faith, his glow of awakening, that’s fine with me. Actually, if he wanted to sing about his dry cleaning, that’d probably be fine with me, too. If the religious aspect bothers you for some reason, a suggestion: mentally make a slight noun substitution, as in “When the light shone through my baby’s eyes.” Simple. Hey, it worked for Ray. There’s a crisp sunniness to A Sense Of Wonder, it’s like a spiritual Tupelo Honey, swaying and open. ’’You know it’s hard some time,” he sings on the opening track, but it doesn’t sound as though he’s straining at all. “Tore Down A La Rimbaud,” “Ancient of Days,” and the title track are Morrison at his most serene, without being so blissed-out that there are no rough edges.
As compelling as Van’s own meditations on, as Pat Boone might call it, his “personal relationship with God” (unlike Boone, Morrison doesn’t imply that he and the Almighty do nine holes on occasional Wednesday afternoons) can be, I’m more knocked out by A Sense Of Wonder’s two cover versions. He takes on Ray Charles’s “What Would I Do Without You,” giving it his own twists of phrasing (“Well I’m craaazy...[pause]...about my baby”), and it fits in with his own expressions of awe and dependence. It could just as easily be about his faith as about a woman he can’t survive without. The other piece of outside material is Mose Allison’s “If You Only Knew,” a cheerily cautionary song about the perils of living and dealing in the material world (take heed, Ms. Ciccone). It’s a casually hip vocal performance, the kind of thing Georgie Fame had a lock on in the early days of the British Invasion, and it’s terrific to hear Morrison loosen up this way.
Tracks such as the Charles and Allison covers, where Morrison can simply be a Singer, bring to mind any number of song-styles he could take a whack at: standards, jive-swing, honky-tonk. If this were the ’30s, someone like John Hammond might put him in the studio with Basie and Prez, cutting pop, blues, small combo and big band jazz. If it were the ’50s, he might be at a place like Atlantic, alongside Charles, Joe Turner and Clyde McPhatter. These are musical fantasies, but what if he hooked up with a feisty young blues band, or with fellow countrymen U2? A Sense Of Wonder is another frequently moving Van Morrison LP, but at its best it suggests that it’s time for him to explore other paths.
