Eric’s Quick Picks – Van Morrison – What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Not much.

Van the Man keeps doing his medium-intensity thing, now for the legendary Blue Note label, and Van IS essentially a pop-jazz and jump-blues singer these days anyway. With strings, reeds and horns providing a sweet but not saccharine, gently swinging bed, Van riffs off of standard blues progressions on his own compositions that could have easily appeared on a Bull Moose Jackson, Big Joe Turner, or Johnny Otis record from the ’40s or ’50s.

Van’s voice is the stuff of primordial Hibernian peat dipped in ’30s Kansas City, ’40s Los Angeles, ’50s Memphis, and ’60s Marin County. This is a tangy, nocturnal reverie from a giant in semi-repose.