Virg. | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This album represents a small percentage of the huge amount of unreleased material Van Morrison is hoping to roll out in the near future, rather than letting it gather dust in some archive.

The big band tracks were recorded in 2014. Paul Moran and Chris White individually picked the songs they wanted to do big band arrangements for. The duets, recorded across 2018 and 2019, highlight an array of leading vocalists in the shape of Kurt Elling, Curtis Stigers, Joss Stone and Willie Nelson. The Willie Nelson duets – ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture’ and ‘Steal My Heart Away’ – also showcase the guitar talents of Lukas Nelson of Promise Of The Real.

Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer, Van Morrison is among popular music’s true innovators, a restless seeker whose incantatory vocals and alchemical fusion of R&B, jazz, blues, and Celtic folk produced perhaps the most spiritually transcendent body of work in the rock & roll canon. Subject only to the whims of his own muse, his recordings cover extraordinary stylistic ground yet retain a consistency and purity virtually unmatched among his contemporaries, connected by the mythic power of his singular musical vision and his incendiary vocal delivery: spiralling repetitions of wails and whispers that bypass the confines of language to articulate emotional truths far beyond the scope of literal meaning.

1) Ain't Gonna Moan No More (duet with Kurt Elling)

2) Broken Record (duet with Kurt Elling)

3) Avalon of the Heart

4) Close Enough for Jazz (duet with Curtis Stigers)

5) I'll Be Your Lover Too

6) Only a Dream

7) So Quiet in Here

8) Someone Like You (duet with Joss Stone)

9) The Beauty of the Days Gone By

10) The Master's Eyes

11) So Complicated

12) Choppin' Wood

13) You Gotta Make It Through the World

14) What's Wrong with This Picture (duet with Willie Nelson)

15) Steal My Heart Away (duet with Willie Nelson)