Before I got to the Jubilee I’d already been well warned that Van Morrison isn’t the most er social performer. He has a habit of going on stage promptly avoiding banter altogether and walking away before the crowd can even notice he’s gone. All of that happened last night but none of it took away from the performance at all.
It helps that Van’s band is ridiculously skilled and impossibly tight and more than able to breathe life into classics like “Into the Mystic” and “Moondance.” The set could’ve done with a little less soloing (or at least more variety in the solos instead of having every instrument solo on every song in the same order) but at the same time you can hardly blame Van for wanting to show off his backing players’ prowess. And his own too as he let rip a few stellar sax solos on top off the guitar piano and harmonica.
But it’s Van’s voice that you come for as much as his songwriting and he still has a knack for teasing out nuances from every syllable. He may as well be singing in Hopelandic half the time but just because he’s unintelligible doesn’t mean he can’t be heard. It’s not like the lyrics matter terribly much at this point – does anyone really believe that he wants to make love to you tonight? But it’s clear that he still gets a thrill out of the music.
As for the infamous aloofness there were a couple of genuinely playful moments and even a pair of thank-yous but it’s true that there wasn’t an all-out effort to engage with the crowd. There didn’t need to be. Three songs drew tears from Fast Forward’s Kari Watson (admittedly an uber-fan) and the audience was on its feet before they even realized Van was gone for good.
