This album represents a small percentage of the huge amount of unreleased material we are 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 and the duets more recently. Chris White and Paul Moran individually picked the songs that they wanted to do new band arrangements for. The Willie Nelson and Kurt Elling tracks were recorded in 2018 and 2019, the Curtis Stigers and Joss Stone tracks in 2018. – Van Morrison CULTURE 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: spiraling repetitions of wails and whispers that bypass the confines of language to articulate emotional truths far beyond the scope of literal meaning.
