The Manhattan Beat: The Music of Van Morrison at Carnegie Hall

Twenty-one performers interpreted 21 Van Morrison songs on March 21, 2019. The Music of Van Morrison was the 16th annual installation of "the music of" series created and curated by Michael Dorf, founder of the City Winery chain. The concert benefitted 10 New York City music programs for youth. The concert was held at Carnegie Hall, where Morrison himself performed perhaps his most memorable New York concert in 1972.

In little more than two hours, Patti Smith, Glen Hansard, Todd Rundgren, the Secret Sisters, David Johansen, John Paul White, Bettye LaVette, Low Cut Connie, William Elliott Whitmore, Valerie June, Anderson East, Richard Marx, the Resistance Revival Chorus, Josh Ritter, Robert Earl Keen, Lee Fields & the Expressions, Amy Helm, Marc Cohn, Shawn Colvin, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and Brian Fallon (of the Gaslight Anthem) interpreted songs from Van Morrison’s vast catalog. The house band consisted of guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboardist Leon Pendarvis, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Steve Jordan, periodically punctuated by the horns from the Brooklyn Afrobeat collective Antibalas. Though advertised to perform, Darlene Love did not appear; no explanation was given.

Van Morrison has recorded 40 albums over a 50-year period, but the set list concentrated principally on Morrison’s first decade in music, with more than half of the evening's selections released by 1971. In contrast, no songs from Morrison's 21st century output were selected. Surprisingly, however, no one sang one of Morrison's best known songs, 1970's "Moondance."

Many of the rendition paralleled Morrison's arrangements, to where separating his uniquely soulful voice in the listener was a Jedi mind trick. The most interesting performances were those by singers who selected deep cuts or reworked Morrison's take. The Blind Boys of Alabama gave a five-part gospel harmony twist to "By His Grace." Late addition Amy Helm teamed with teen vocalist Jayri Alvarez and other students from Little Kids Rock, one of the concert's beneficiaries, on "If I Ever Needed Someone." Robert Earl Keen replaced Morrison's horns on "Wild Night" with a mandolin and a fiddle. The Resistance Revival Chorus, a vocal group comprised of more than 30 women dressed in white, sang Morrison’s "Days like This," the song which became the official anthem of the peace movement in Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s. Many artists gave lively performances, but perhaps Low Cut Connie's "Here Comes The Night" was the wildest, with vocalist Adam Weiner standing on his piano and ending the song by running through the audience.

"We’d like to thank Van for making the kind of music that brings two Alabama rednecks to Carnegie Hall," said the Secret Sisters in introducing their version of "Precious Time."

"Well, I know he doesn't like this version but I'm thanking him anyway. Thank you Van. Thank you for everything," said Patti Smith as she ended the evening with -- no surprise -- her often-sung version of "Gloria." As the song progressed, many of the evening's performers came on stage as a backing chorus.

Were all the performances stellar? As Glen Hansard told the audience when what seemed like a sound problem led him to sing the end of "Astral Weeks" unamplified from the lip of the stage, "When you sing from the heart, it’s never out of tune."