The Van Morrison Alumni Band (Cadogan Hall Friday 29.11.2024)
Last Friday evening – after contacting a London-based couple we’ve known for a while to enquire whether they’d noticed this advertised concert and were informed they’d already bought tickets for it – the Memsahib and I attended an evening of Van Morrison’s music as performed by THE VAN MORRISON ALUMNI BAND at the Cadogan Hall off Sloane Square.
Said outfit happens to be comprised primarily of a group of musicians who have played hundreds if not thousands of times in Mr Morrison’s backing band over the past thirty-five years, love his music and survived the experience.
As the host – saxophonist and musical director Leo Green, otherwise a Radio 2 and Jazz FM broadcaster, wryly reported during his introduction, at one time or another most of them had experienced the distinction of also being fired by their boss(!) and, when Green had raised with him the prospect of them getting together and going on tour to play his music “just for the fun and joy of doing so”, Van The Man’s first response was a characteristically-blunt “Why?”.
Nevertheless, here they now were, and for Morrison fans – in whose number I count myself – it was a worthy and very positive experience to hear some of his finest songs being expertly reproduced “live” by a band who have now toured extensively all over Europe and the UK.
The novelty was that – instead of having a lead singer seeking to impersonate one of the all-time great vocalists of 20th Century popular music, or perhaps worse, sing his songs in a different way (e.g. in their own, inferior, manner), those in charge has taken either the bold move – or possibly cleverly “copped out” – by replacing him with not one but two female vocalists: Jo Harman and Natalie May Harris, both of whom in their different ways were excellent.
In our post-mortem afterwards I gave the evening 7.5 out of 10.
Rightly or wrongly, I took a point off simply because of the “weirdness” of hearing a female artiste performing songs such as (She’s my) Brown-Eyed Girl and (She Gives me) Crazy Love.
My apologies – and in mitigation I can only plead my age (73) and the fact I’m a little old-fashioned …
