ALUMNI SHOP
THE VAN MORRISON ALUMNI BAND - Volume 1
A stunning debut album from The Van Morrison Alumni Band, featuring brand new interpretations of some of Van Morrison's most loved songs.
Songwriting is a craft, but performance is an art. Songwriters and musicians alike work in a tradition, and musicians rework it in performance. ​​
The division of labour between the songwriter in the studio and the singer on the stage dissolved when the firm of Lennon & McCartney opened shop circa 1963.
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After that, everyone was supposed to be his own partner: the songwriter and the singer, singer and the song. This was lonely work, and it helped if you had
a partner. Lennon had McCartney. Jagger has Richards. Van Morrison does it alone.
​Van Morrison’s music is singular. If you write with someone else, you might come up with something you didn’t expect, but the surprises will often include compromises that never satisfy either of you. If you write and play with the same band, their virtues will become your defects. Their temperaments and talents will restrict the growth and interpretation of your ideas. Again, Van Morrison is different. After his early excursions with Them, he travelled alone, picking the right players for each session and tour. Several of them are on this album.
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The Alumni are graduates of Professor Morrison’s classes in what Dr. Sinatra called the “cross-country college”. This album contains their scholarly reflections in the rearview mirror of the musical life. It is not a collection of covers, because covers try to replicate the original. If the Alumni are a tribute act, it is only in the sense that a classical orchestra plays tribute to the composer by playing his tunes. Like McCoy Tyner’s reworking of Bacharach & David’s on "What the World Needs Now" (1997), this album is a “songbook” album.
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Produced by Norman Granz and released between 1956 and 1964, the eight albums of the Ella Fitzgerald Song Books canonized the output of the songwriters of the golden age, from Cole Porter to Johnny Mercer.
The idea wasn’t entirely new. The singer Lee Wiley had issued a series of abbreviated selections from the major writers between 1939 and the early 1950s. Granz had recorded ten albums of the Oscar Peterson Plays… series between 1952 and 1955 (and would record a further nine between 1957 and 1961).
​A songbook performance is a tricky thing. The recording must emphasize the qualities that made the song matter in the first place, but the song must also bring out the qualities of its performers in their time and place. The result has to be true in its fashion to both the original and its interpreters. Rock musicians struggle with the technical subtleties required by this challenge. Van Morrison, who is a jazz musician who happens to have sold a lot of tickets and albums, has frequently risen to it in his own music. Many of his Alumni collaborators are jazzers too.
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​​Consider “Into the Mystic.” The Alumni play it in the manner of Van’s original 1970 Moondance recording: languid in pace, almost offhand in delivery, the vocal framed by the strumming of the acoustic guitar and the swelling horns. But we’re barely halfway into the first verse before an impertinently focused single stab from the sax and flugel reminds us that while soulful horns are essential to the spirit of the original, there’s more than one way to go about it.
That single stab is from the sweating, striving, super-tight sound world of James Brown—a far cry from the mellow acoustic vibe, but right next door in musical terms. Van’s original of “Into the Mystic” is a miniature. Its final release, opened by his cry “It’s too late to stop now!”, leads to an understated flourish from the horns and then a hard stop that comes almost as a shock. The Alumni detect other possibilities in the final sequence. Instead uniting in a final drive to the finish, Leo and Matt split and trade solos. As they talk back and forth in the language of the song, the open-ended possibilities of the original take musical form. And then they slip into “Caravan.” The band tighten up. We realize that we’re hearing a medley. Each song modifies the others, and the band modify them all. After Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook albums, people realized that there was such a thing as a unique musical tradition called the Great American Songbook.
Van Morrison is singular and his music is unique, but Van would be the first to say that he works in a tradition, and that his writing and singing fall within it. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. That was in 1919, when the collaborative art of popular music as we know it was just getting started. In his essay, Eliot argued that poetry requires a sense of both the “presence” and the “pastness” of the past; as musicians know, it’s all about time. Each new work modifies its tradition. The critics look for difference and innovation, and they praise the “peculiar essence” of the poet, but if we actually listen, we’ll soon hear that “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”
T.S. Eliot made use of jazz lyrics and rhythm in “The Waste Land”. He wrote perhaps the first and certainly the last scholarly essay about the music hall singer Marie Lloyd. And of course he wrote the lyrics to what, after Andrew Lloyd Webber had buttered up the second Mrs. Eliot like a stack of hot crumpets, became the musical Cats. In the same essay, Eliot could have been describing the sideman’s task as he strives to interpret the singer and the song just outside
the spotlight: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
Nice work if you can get it. The Alumni know Van’s music and the tradition. They know how to strike the philosopher’s tone and balance each phrase between past and present. They know that a great song both stands alone and stands in
a tradition in which each composition is a contribution, each performance an interpretation. This is how a tradition is made and how it lives forever.
I have followed Leo Green’s career with interest ever since I was two years old and he came home from the hospital. I have observed the Prince of Wails from the stage, in the stalls and on the screen. During my misspent youth, I played with all the chaps on this recording. I know that, like most musicians, they profess to see music as work, the better to protect their true feelings in a tough business. What I hear on these recordings is a confession of their love for music —and the deep peer-to-peer respect that all musicians have for Van’s music.
Dominic Green, London, 2025