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Variety - PHIL GALLO
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Without breaking new ground on his new album, much of which filled Tuesday’s show at the recently renovated Austin Music Hall, Van Morrison has returned to mixing up blues, jazz and country in single songs, producing a mellow yet grounded amalgam. It’s mumbled and full of regret and memories, as likely to have a line - lyrical or melodic - lifted from Duke Ellington or George Jones. New album, “Keep it Simple” on Lost Highway, is not about to shake up the world, but it works in concert as the mortar between recent efforts that were strictly jazz or blues, and Morrison is displaying considerable command of the material vocally.
Seventeen-song concert features only two of Morrison’s best-known tunes: “Moondance,” which provides room for a half-dozen soloists, and “Bright Side of the Road.” Two standards were in the set, an emotionally pure “St. James Infirmary” with blissful trumpet-alto sax duet between Crawford Bell and Morrison, and the Ray Charles smash “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
Charles’ spirit has loomed heavy over Morrison’s work over the last several albums and it appears Morrison is intent on discarding anything that does not work in this mold. Morrison, like Charles in the 1960s, has strived to reconcile, or at least create a central meeting ground, for blues and country music. The meeting place here is relatively languid , which suits the musicians well; in recent years, he has ostensibly had two bands onstage - one full of horns, the other out of Nashville - and only on a handful of tunes did they work together. There is a dominant color though: Bluesy solos were abundant Tuesday evening.
New album features all Morrison originals, highlighted by the few that tap in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s rock firmament. “Behind the Ritual” intersects his “Into the Mystic” and “Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-o-Dee”; “That’s Entrainment,” the term refers to the effect of rhythm on the mind, is a throwback to his ambling word journeys. “Don’t Go To Nightclubs Anymore” references not seeing his buddy Mose Allison, although the song is through-and-through Allison style.
“School of Hard Knocks” and “How Can a Poor Boy” more strictly adhere to a blues formula; “No Thing” brings in a honky-tonk element. Remarkably, the band and leader appear quite comfortable with all of it.
One of just four U.S. dates before a tour of Europe, Morrison performs Saturday at New York's United Palace.
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austin360 - John DeFore
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Van Morrison took the Austin Music Hall stage, as promised, at the stroke of 7 p.m. Tuesday. Exactly 90 minutes later, he dropped the words “big hand for the band!” into the rambling wrap-up of a song that few listeners seemed to know. About three minutes later, stagehands were clearing instruments, the hall’s harsh fluorescent tubes were on (the place is obviously a work in progress, if acoustics under the balcony are any sign) and listeners were bemusedly filing out. Most may have been Of A Certain Age, but they were clearly willing to risk a 9 p.m. bedtime in exchange for an encore — in fact, many looked annoyed at being sent home so early.
But the show wasn’t as lazy as the perfunctory running time might suggest. True, it slogged down here and there, but Van the Man earned his keep — sometimes gaining artistic cred perversely by not giving the crowd what it obviously wanted: Only two songs in the set list could remotely be called hits. Of those, “Bright Side of the Road” was nearly unrecognizable, countrified with banjo and tambourine; “Moondance,” the early crowd-pleaser, featured a nicely playful lead vocal but also, weirdly, was the tune on which Morrison chose to dish out introductions and perfunctory solos to most of his dozen or so bandmates.
The rest of the evening leaned heavily on tracks from “Keep it Simple,” the songwriter’s forthcoming album, and if the tunes weren’t classic they at least let Morrison prove he’s no slave to the nostalgia circuit. He’ll play the songs he wants, thank you, showing off his capable handling of the alto sax and scatting enough to make the least interesting lyrics worth hearing. The night’s highlight was an oddball: the group’s eerie, New Orleans-inflected take on “St. James Infirmary,” a song nobody paid to hear but all were lucky to get.