His Band and the Street Choir

Editors’ Notes

Shorter on transcendence than his two previous releases – Astral Weeks, Moondance – His Band the Street Choir features 12 succinct folk and R&B flavored jabs, best exemplified by the album’s hit single “Domino.” Alongside Jack Schroer’s saxophones and Keith Johnson’s trumpet, Morrison pitts himself as a streetwise world-weary hustler trying to get back to the land. The album has the feel of hippie hangover marked in its early ‘70s grooves; the artistic schizophrenia is everywhere. Morrison vacillates between his contemporary young, hippie inclinations (“Virgo Clowns,” “If I Ever Needed Someone,” “Street Choir”) and the tough blues tradition of his adolescence (“I’ve Been Workin’,” “Blue Money,” “Call Me Up in Dreamland”), making for an album of brilliant moments but little actual flow. Tellingly, the album’s greatest success is its final track, “Street Choir,” where with his well-seasoned sidemen and accomplished backing vocalists, the Irish singer attempts to understand his confused relationship with America, the land that brought him the music that inspired him and which he now struggled to call home.