Quartet from Italy featuring two ex-members of Effervescent Elephants.Their music is a blend of blues rock, acoustic psychedelia and garage psych.These guys will take you on a magic carpet ride to oblivion.All phased vocals, reverb and fuzz a-plenty. Astral Weeks was founded in 1996 and released a bizarre CD for Mellow Records their music has been defined an original blending of psycho-raga-blues and if compared to their mainly acoustic debut (''The original Astral Weeks' sound''), has become more and more electric over the years. Two ex Effervescent Elephants (Lodovico Ellena & Aldo Casciano) are members of the group, a well-know Italian psychedelic band the others are veteran bass-player Mauro Coda and young guitarist Max Mussetti. The band's philosophy is to privilege the hot, crude sounds of the garage-studio, to the cleaner sounds of the recording studio.
Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history, but for all that renown, it is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album. It isn’t a rock & roll album at all. Van Morrison plays acoustic guitar and sings in his elastic, bluesy, soulful voice, accompanied by crack group of jazz studio players: guitarist Jay Berliner, upright bassist Richard Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay, vibraphonist Warren Smith and soprano saxophonist John Payne (also credited on flute, though that’s debatable—some claim an anonymous flutist provided those parts). Producer Lewis Merenstein added chamber orchestrations later and divided the album into halves: “In The Beginning” and “Afterwards,” with four tunes under each heading.
Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (1968). Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history, but for all that renown, it is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album. It it isn't a rock & roll album at all. Van Morrison plays acoustic guitar and sings in his elastic, bluesy, soulful voice, accompanied by crack group of jazz studio players: guitarist Jay Berliner, upright bassist Richard Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay, vibraphonist Warren Smith and soprano saxophonist John Payne (also credited on flute, though that's debatable - some claim an anonymous flutist provided those parts). Producer Lewis Merenstein added chamber orchestrations later and divided the album into halves: "In The Beginning" and "Afterwards" with four tunes under each heading…