'I'm nothing but a stranger in this world. Got a home on high.'
It's so difficult to do justice to Astral Weeks. I imagine Van Morrison is still catching up to it. I think it's the kind of album that people will hold in front of them in 300 years time and say proudly that this is how they understand life. I hope so! Because to some extent it's how I understand mine.
One of my earliest memories when I was growing up in Zimbabwe, (I was there until I was six), was probably walking down the path in the garden past the chameleons on the boughs that stared back at me and the chungalullas beneath my feet under that huge sky and getting a strong sense of my own consciousness, the fact that I was alive, and quite alone but at the same time part of the enormous joy of the universe and communal humanity.
Astral Weeks always helps me to understand that. It's a much greater work of art than I'll ever be a part of or could even aspire to. That stands for pretty much all of us. It's a record that understands bliss, joy, passion, grief, awe, desire, horror, pain, love and pretty much every other emotion in the panoply. It's a quite remarkable record for a 23 year old man to produce almost on his own (though of course the playing of the absolutely top rate jazz musicians is extraordinary), through a pure sense of vision and drive. It's just indescribable in its scope. Listen to it if you don't know already.
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