I didn’t deliberately go down a jazz route, because that might have taken away from how the songs were constructed. The song itself tells you what’s acceptable. I wanted my musicians to do what the original musicians did: to play with it and ensure it works on stage to tell the album’s story. I wanted to capture this organic idea of the album with its stream of consciousness lyrics, so I approached his words as poetry, breaking them down into keywords and themes. Since Van Morrison’s voice is such an integral part of Astral Weeks, I treated it like an instrument one part of the conversation between the layers of instrumentation. When it came to reimagining the work, it was seriously daunting. They had a third session planned but it was in the morning – and jazz musicians and the morning don’t always go together. That was cool because they were allowed freedom to perform entirely in the moment – and they recorded it over only two sessions. Van Morrison just said to them: “Whatever you hear, play it and go with it.” The instructions were very short and the rest was up to the musicians.
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