Tickets go on sale this weekend for Van Morrison’s two shows at the Hollywood Bowl in early November, and while a show by an aging star of the ’60s isn’t usually news around here, when the artist in question is doing the “play your critically acclaimed album front to back” and that album happens Astral Weeks (my favorite of all time) and the performance features Jay Berliner and Richard Davis from the studio band, I’m going to be a little excited.
It’s not a terribly bold position to claim Astral Weeks as a “favorite” album–it’s generally featured on most “all-time best” lists–but I honestly love the album more than anything else I’ve heard on a full-length level. The songs are so beautiful and weird that I go back to listening to the disc over and over again. Of course, I’m allowing that I may be disappointed, but the novelty alone of seeing Berliner (a jazz guitarist who played with Charles Mingus and others who was roped into the sessions) and Davis (a bassist who played on Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch, most notably) with Morrison’s band is enough lure for me.
While YouTube is stingy on clips from the album itself, Morrison has been playing tracks from the album live this year, including this take on “Cyprus Avenue”.
Music Legend Van Morrison to Close Out Hollywood Bowl 2008 Season with “Astral Weeks Live” in November [Marketwatch]
Holy shit! Richard was my jazz teacher and occasional mentor for 4 semesters in Madison (I repeated his course on Jazz History four times).
He is hands down the baddest motherfucker on the planet, and also probably our greatest living bassist. I’ve spoken with him about his work on Van’s album (one of my favs as well) – Richard couldn’t care less about it. He swears it was just another session for him and that he hardly remembers the details. Van the Man must have cut a seriously large check to get Richard out to California to play these songs that he probably hasn’t listened to since the day they were recorded.
But in any case this should be one hell of a show – here’s hoping they bring Richard and Jay east for another version of this… It’s just too bad Connie ‘The Security Officer’ Kay isn’t around to lend a hand to the festivities.
haha – i lived in madison summer of 2000 and didn’t know he was the bass teacher there. when i found out, i emailed him and said “hey there’s an article about you in the weekly rag; you want i should bring it by?” he was gracious and did invite me over, and HOLY FUCK I MET RICHARD DAVIS. astral weeks is also my all time favorite album if i have to name one. and yeah – when i asked him about it he just shrugged “we were just doing what we did.” i let it go at that.
Madison must have a great school! doesn’t Clyde Stubblefield teach drums there too?
I can’t imagine Davis made that much more money from that session than any other; I’d guess he’d have a going rate by that point, better than scale but not a star rate. the producers probably knew him and called him in.
I have an odd relationship with Astral Weeks. When I was in high school it was a huge, huge album for me, for a time my very favorite. But I cooled hard on it afterward, and I haven’t listened to it in at least a decade. I tend to remember my fondness of it as pretty wet and romantic, but I still do like some of those songs a lot, esp. “Sweet Thing.”
yeah, it was spring of my senior year in high school when i first heard it – wet romantic times indeed. listening to it now is mostly a beginning-of-spring, end-of-summer ritual. never was crazy about “beside you,” but the rest of it still kinda slays me, and the very very last seconds make for one of the greatest album endings ever.
re: clyde stubblefield, that makes sense, since he used to be the house drummer for the madison-based “whad’ya know”…
The story on how Richard got to Madison is pretty funny actually. He was big in the classical world as well as jazz – he was the first black bassists (or one of them) in many great orchestras. Madison didn’t have much in the way of a jazz program and when they decided to change that, Richard’s name was recommended (I believe by another legend of a different genre, Gunther Schuller, who dabbled in jazz – if you can call playing horns on ‘Birth of the Cool’ dabbling) and they called him up.
So Richard gets an offer to teach jazz and he goes and asks a friend (presumably a member of his stable of female german jazz fans) what he should do. She told him he should ask for tenure, so that’s what he did. The administration explained that tenure is only given to professors who have been around for a long time and excelled and all that, and Richard said, fuck that shit I’m Richard Davis, and he got his tenure along with a beautiful house on Lake Monona (fun fact – Lake Monona was Otis Redding’s watery grave). He’s been there ever since, teaching curious youngsters about jazz (though he teaches race relations as much if not more than jazz history), telling the most insane stories about jazz greats you’ll ever hear, and generally acting like the supreme gangster grandfather to everyone in his class.
As for Clyde Stubblefield, he’s not actually a teacher, but Clyde does have a jam session every Monday at King’s Club for 5 bucks (2 for students). Anyone with a horn and a desire to get funky can show up and play a few choruses with the Funky Drummer himself.
Clyde and Richard are the coolest men in the state of Wisconsin (now that Favre is gone), hands down.
Madison is a weird scene if you’re a jazzer (which I’m not exactly) as there are a bunch of awesome/legendary players just kind of hanging around, making some actual money (which they mostly didn’t make doing the things they are legendary for) doing things like teaching/leading low-key, well attended “open mics”, etc.
That being said, it is a pretty good music scene.