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Sixty years ago Steve Voce found very good jazz solos amidst the usual Mingus mix of ugliness, brutality, hokum and sensitivity

Van Morrison : Moondance, news, music news, Ireland

I researched and wrote this for Van Morrison's 75th birthday two years ago. I have slightly downsized it to pay tribute to him as he turns 77 this week. He is a brilliant, eccentric, enigmatic, essential singer/songwriter, performer, and multi-instrumental musician. He's not for everyone. If you respond to his aesthetic, however, there is no one who comes close. Clinton Heylin peered into Van's life and work in Van Morrison:

We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago.....   Before he became a pop-star crooner in the late 70's, George Benson released a seri...

Photographs by Gavin Bond It would be difficult to find two rock alumni with more distinctive voices. In the left corner we have Van Morrison, a man who still talks exactly as he sings. Even though he speaks with a rough mid-Atlantic Belfast brogue, when Morrison talks you immediately expect a full 100-person orchestra to spring up behind him, swathing his harsh vowels in mellifluous strings and deep, sombre tenor saxophones, transporting the pair of you to a windswept Donegal beach. In the right corner we have John Cooper Clarke, the cadaverous punk poet whose velvet voice of discontent (©K...