For those keeping score, yes, You’re Driving Me Crazy is the third album Van Morrison has released since September of 2017, when he delivered the hard-charging blues of Roll With the Punches. In December, he put out Versatile, an amiable collection grounded by standards that found him moving toward jazz. Morrison’s newest release delves even deeper into the genre, pairing the 1960s legend with jazz organist, composer, and bandleader Joey DeFrancesco.
The swift pace Morrison is keeping at age 72 may have as much to do with licensing as it does with inspiration. You’re Driving Me Crazy is the first Van Morrison album to be released on Sony subsidiaries throughout the world (a fact obscured slightly by Versatile, which inaugurated his domestic deal with the label in the U.S. but was licensed to Caroline elsewhere). So, maybe Morrison was running out a contract. But that doesn’t mean he was scrambling to record a bunch of gibberish, the way he did in 1967, so he could leave Bang Records and make Astral Weeks for Warner Bros. Five decades later, he doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get anywhere; judging by Roll With the Punches and Versatile, two pleasurable albums of familiar tunes performed by a crew composed largely of longtime Van veterans, he’s happy right where he is.
You’re Driving Me Crazy adjusts that formula, with Morrison swapping out his usual suspects for Joey DeFrancesco’s hard-driving soul-jazz combo of guitarist Dan Wilson, tenor saxophonist Troy Roberts, and drummer Michael Ode. Joined on occasion by Van’s vocalist daughter, Shana, the quintet knocked out the album in a couple of days, just like acts used to do in the mid-20th-century heyday of Blue Note and Prestige.
Apart from his enduring (and endearing) dedication to making albums that test the limits of how much music can fit on a compact disc, Morrison never pretends to engage with the modern world on You’re Driving Me Crazy. He’s not a throwback, though; he’s carrying on a tradition, and that may be why he sees a kindred spirit in 47-year-old DeFrancesco, who has spent his career extending the legacy of music made before his birth. DeFrancesco started out as a wunderkind, signing to Columbia Records as a teenager in the late 1980s and becoming one of the youngest musicians ever to tour with Miles Davis. Eventually, he settled into a groove as a savvy traditionalist: He’d record a tribute to hard-bop pioneer Horace Silver but had enough of a sense of humor to title a 1999 album Goodfellas and pose as a mafia don on its cover.
This approach makes DeFrancesco an ideal foil for Morrison. Respectful but impish, the organist jabs new retorts into tunes the two know by heart. For his part, Morrison seems inspired by the band, playing with his phrasing so that his vocals mimic a saxophone on a lazy rendition of “Miss Otis Regrets”—whose final stretch finds him elongating his notes, then launching into a string of staccato growls—and happily riding a fevered groove on “Close Enough for Jazz.” The latter is one of several original compositions Morrison dug up from his catalog to sit alongside such warhorses as Eddie Jones’ “The Things I Used to Do” and B.B. King’s “Everyday I Have the Blues”—tunes that have been reliable crowd-pleasers for bar bands since they were hits in the ’50s. Morrison and DeFrancesco don’t reinvent these classics so much as they inhabit them, the sheer verve of the group rendering each one vivid and alive.
On You’re Driving Me Crazy, the songs are essentially conduits for the creation of music. Morrison doesn’t disregard the lyrics; his interpretations are always grounded in the spirit of the original. But he’s clearly thrilled to play with a band as lively and dextrous as DeFrancesco’s, so he positions his voice as another boisterous instrument within the group. There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment. Early in his career, he searched for truth within his own songwriting. Now, he finds meaning in simply playing music—an act that is by its nature transient but also, sometimes, transcendent.
