The album’s embrace of acoustic jazz as a way forward had a profound impact on the burgeoning “singer songwriter” movement, and for better or worse has become instant point of comparison with subsequent work by musicians such as Joni Mitchell or Tim Buckley or Nick Drake. Morrison’s artistic success on Astral Weeks was, and remains, startling. Astral Weeks (1968) is an echo of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), where an extraordinarily talented group of jazz musicians received a similar lack of instruction, and Love’s Forever Changes (1967), where the pop songwriter deliberately challenged the very notion and direction of his craft. It’s what I love about rock, and it’s what made Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks happen.ĭrummer Connie Kay and guitarist Jay Berliner both famously recounted that Morrison told his musicians - and these weren’t just any musicians, but some of the finest jazz players New York could provide in the late 1960s, led by the inimitable bassist Richard Davis - to “play what you want” and then left them alone to back and guide him on a set of eight songs whose precedents were slim and bore little relation to the rock-pop classics he recorded with his band Them (“Gloria,” “Here Comes the Night”) or on his first solo album (“Brown Eyed Girl”). It is in rock’s nature to empower its listeners to create, and within this space there is no genre, no boogie no punk no progressive no pop no indie no folk, just an honoring of the empty canvas and the unrestrained fire banked down in humanity. Before the work, within the work, we are all children. A sign that we don’t stand in willful ignorance.

And, like at all great museums, any pretense to surface comportment is, if meaningful at all, only a nod of respect to the spark of human creativity. There is no entrance fee or warnings to stand back, please, from the piece. The art gallery of rock and roll is a rich and welcoming place, with room upon room spinning off into many-directioned distances.

Van morrison astral weeks meaning