On Duets: Re-Working The Catalogue, Van Morrison and the guests selected and recorded some of his songs from the catalog of 360 songs across his career. Deliberately steering away from his more well-known classics, Van enlisted some of the artists he most respects to perform these songs with him to re-craft and re-imagine them. The album was recorded in his home town of Belfast and London in the United Kingdom over the last year, using a variety of musicians and fresh arrangements.
Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer, Van Morrison is among popular music's true innovators, a restless seeker whose incantatory vocals and alchemical fusion of R&B, jazz, blues, and Celtic folk produced perhaps the most spiritually transcendent body of work in the rock & roll canon…
While Van Morrison is, to be kind, an erratic and temperamental live performer, he's in stellar form throughout the double album It's Too Late to Stop Now, a superb concert set that neatly summarizes his career from his days with Them…
Van Morrison's late career tear continues with You're Driving Me Crazy, his third album in seven months. Following the formula of 2017's Roll with the Punches and Versatile – each offered jazz, blues and R&B standards and redone originals – this set offers eight tracks from Morrison's catalog and seven standards. it stands on its own, however, as a collaborative encounter with jazz organist and trumpeter Joey DeFrancesco's hip quartet. They all holed up in a Sausalito studio and completed the recording in only two days, capturing everything in a take or two.
Great idea on paper – invite rock's Van Morrison, his then-organ/vocal-sidekick Georgie Fame, singer/pianist/producer Ben Sidran, and Mose Allison himself to compile a celebration of one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic songwriters of our time. And these are serious Allison buffs indeed, for they chose tunes from the back catalog that Mose rarely performed live in the '90s, with hardly a well-known Allison standard in the batch (the exception being "I Don't Want Much"). The hang-up is that Allison's own performances over the decades are so unique and right for their material that they pose a creative problem for anyone who wants to give these songs a different slant.