Album reviews: Van Morrison | The Rolling Stones | The Just Joans

Van Morrison: Versatile (Caroline International) ***

The Rolling Stones: On Air (Polydor) ****

The Just Joans: You Might Be Smiling Now… (Fika Recordings) ***

Willie Campbell & The Open Day Rotation: New Clouds In Motion (Invisible Kings) ***

On stage in Glasgow a few weeks ago, Van Morrison ripped through a no-filler set like he had a train to catch. Versatile is his third album release in 15 months. Has he laid a who-can-cover-the-most-standards wager with Rod Stewart and Bob Dylan? And dare it be said that the famously gruff Sir Van is having the musical time of his life aged 72?

His previous album, Roll with the Punches, on which he delivered a mix of covers and originals with a predominantly rhythm’n’blues slant, is barely two months old and now he repeats the model with his equally beloved jazz, taking on Gershwin and Porter with barely a pause to loosen his collar and tipping the trilby to Sinatra in his louche delivery of The Party’s Over.

Affirmation, with James Galway on flute, is an easy listening instrumental to drift away on, A Foggy Day and Makin’ Whoopee are songs to snuggle up to over Christmas; more unexpected is his own smooth saxophone arrangement of the Skye Boat Song.

Nestling contentedly in this company are a handful of relaxed, feelgood originals. Morrison stirs in some blues on Take It Easy Baby, applies Bacharach-style horns to the swing number Start All Over Again, playfully imitates the eponymous Broken Record and, in his unsentimental way, captures a mix of agony and ecstasy on I Forgot That Love Existed.

The Rolling Stones returned to their rhythm’n’blues roots with reasonable virility on their 2016 covers collection Blue & Lonesome. The Rolling Stones – On Air, a compilation of early radio appearances on such BBC shows as Saturday Club, Top Gear and Yeah Yeah, is a reminder of how they attacked the canon as hungry young men.

Chuck Berry favourites, including their debut single Come On, feature heavily, while Bo Diddley’s Cops and Robbers is dispatched with nefarious swagger and a pretty convincing American accent from Mick Jagger. But it also documents their nascent ability to mine a tradition for their own ends – witness the alacrity with which Jagger delivers The Spider and the Fly.

The rock’n’roll hoopla came later but the raw live take of It’s All Over Now from a 1964 edition of The Joe Loss Pop Show showcases the no-frills impact the Stones could make in their cub years.

Glaswegian brother/sister act David and Katie Pope, aka The Just Joans, were last heard round these parts on their 2006 debut Last Tango in Motherwell. You Might Be Smiling Now picks up the trail with a tempered mix of twee indie pop, guttural melancholy and a dry sense of humour on tracks such as You Make Me Physically Sick (Let’s Start Having Children), capturing what David describes as “the confusion in my teenage years, the horror of my twenties and the terror of my encroaching middle age.” What listener of a certain age cannot identify with that? Meanwhile, his sister’s finest interjection is Caledonian country ballad confessional I Only Smoke When I Drink.

Willie Campbell, onetime frontman of Glasgow-based indie pop band Astrid, now records as The Open Day Rotation from his home base on Lewis. New Clouds In Motion is a warmly crafted collection drawing on a number of intersecting traditions from the country soul of New Eyes of Gold to wistful folk lament Winter Late in Spring. I’ve Got A Kite sounds like a lost Teenage Fanclub track – so far so familiar, until Campbell adds a surprise blast of E Street Band sax to Going Through the Motions.

CLASSICAL

Sofya Gulyak: Chaconne (Champs Hill) ****

Sofya Gulyak, 2009 winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition and the first woman to do so, takes a refreshing look at the musical form Chaconne in this powerful and virtuosic recording. She opens with the most famous one of all, Bach’s mighty finale to the second solo partita for solo violin, sonorously re-imagined by Busoni in his transcription for piano. Gulyak’s performance is monumental, both in its sense of epic structure and in the huge expressive range she achieves. Liszt’s transcription of Handel’s Sarabande and Chaconne from Almira is no less a powerhouse, but here the pianist homes in on its Lisztian mysteriousness. More Busoni, this time his own glittering Toccata, Prelude, Fantasy and Chaconne, before the refreshing Scandinavian delicacy that is Carl Nielsen’s Chaconne, Afredo Cassela’s rhapsodic Variations on a Chaconne and finally the crashing contemporary virtuosity of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne. So many Chaconnes, but each with its own distinctive persona.

Ken Walton

FOLK

Arthur Cormack: Buanas (Macmeanmna) ****

A fine, constant voice on the Gaelic music scene for three decades since he was a teenage Mòd gold medallist, Arthur Cormack has nevertheless not been a prolific recording artist in his own right, largely due to his commitment to the music of others through his record label Macmeanmna, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the feis movement and much else. In this long overdue album, recorded with a sterling assembly of Highland musicians, he remains in easefully melodious form, from the opening Cha tig Mòr mo bhean dhachaigh, through the country-ish glide of Mo Mhaìri mhin and the gently poised lament of Thàinig maor na mo dhàil, with Mary Ann Kennedy on harp. There’s authoritative clarity in the wry, unaccompanied lament, Ged is socrach mo leaba, and in the stately Latha dhomh sa Chuilthionn chreagach – an account of the last clan battle fought on Skye, with effective accompaniment from Blair Douglas on piano and backing vocals from Rachel Walker.

Jim Gilchrist

Album reviews: Van Morrison | The Rolling Stones | The Just Joans | Willie Campbell & The Open Day Rotation