Leo Green: My Songwriting Hero, Van Morrison

Leo Green: “I love the fact that Van’s songwriting pulls from all these different places and influences, and yet they still sound like Van Morrison songs.”

From studio sessions to live performances – the saxophonist on collaborating with the iconic songwriter and witnessing his craft first-hand

Born in Belfast in 1945, Van Morrison grew up steeped in his father’s record collection of blues, gospel, country and jazz – influences that would fuel one of the most adventurous songwriting careers of the 20th century. From the proto-garage-rock urgency of Gloria with Them, through the lyrical mysticism of Astral Weeks (1968), and the enduring soul of Moondance, Tupelo Honey and Days Like This, Morrison has continually crossed boundaries of genre and form. His catalogue, stretching across more than fifty albums, embraces jazz, blues, folk, pop and rock and roll, a body of work still expanding as he continues to record and release new music today. Among its most iconic songs are Brown Eyed Girl, Days Like This, Have I Told You Lately, Crazy Love and Into The Mystic.

Carrying that legacy forward is the Van Morrison Alumni Band, led by saxophonist Leo Green. Having toured the world with Morrison and recorded on albums including Days Like This and The Healing Game, Green now curates an all-star ensemble of former bandmates. Ahead of their upcoming UK tour, he offers a unique perspective on Morrison’s artistry – revealing what it was like to work alongside him, and why his gifts as songwriter, arranger and bandleader remain unparalleled…

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“Like most people, I knew the hits. I’d heard Moondance, Gloria, Brown Eyed Girl, all those big ones… I’d spent two years in Jerry Lee Lewis’s band. I was about 18 or 19. At the time, Jerry Lee Lewis was living in Ireland. I grew up near Watford and hadn’t ever been to Ireland before. I went over there, did some gigs, and really discovered Van’s music from being in Belfast and Dublin and travelling around. It’s hard to come across Irish musicians without hearing his music.

“What really attracted me was that you could hear that Van was really a jazz, blues, and soul musician. Whereas I might not have immediately known the songs, the musical texture of the songs was very familiar, because some of his records sound like early Joe Turner rhythm and blues records, or those early Ray Charles records where it’s a small group, but it almost sounds like a big band. I really recognised the musical environments that Van’s songs were living in. So, I knew the big songs, and then, as I dug deeper and deeper, it became clear that his canon of work encompassed jazz, blues, country, folk, soul, rock and roll… incredible.

“I went and saw a gig he was doing at a small hotel in Newport called the Kings Hotel and was knocked out. It was like someone had punched me in the face. Suddenly, there was a musical world that seemed to encompass all the things I loved. I wrote him a letter saying, ‘Should you ever be looking for a saxophone player, I’d love to join your band.’

“That was in 1993. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from his tour manager saying, ‘We’ve got your letter, Van says would you come to a gig and play with the support act so he can hear you and we can take it from there?’ I got myself to, I think it was Edinburgh, and the support act was a guy I knew called James Hunter, who was this amazing Ray Charles/Sam Cooke-type blues singer from the UK. He was going under the name of Howlin’ Wilf at the time. I played with him, and I met Van, we got talking, and he asked what I was into. We talked about music for a bit, and the name Louis Prima came up, who I’m a mad fan of. Van said, ‘We do a Louis Prima song. Why don’t you come and join me on Oh Marie and we’ll see what happens.’ I got up, sat in with him on this song, and ended up staying years.

Leo Green: “You’re constantly being tested and pulled in musical directions that you don’t really expect.”

“What’s incredible about working with someone like Van is the canon of songs he’s written, more than 1,000 probably, and not all of them have been published. You were expected to know at least 300/400 songs from this body of work. He could pull from that at any time. That said, and this is what I loved about working with him… You’d be playing one of his songs, and suddenly he’d chuck in a Hank Williams song, or he’d chuck in a Cole Porter song, so you never really knew… As a musician, it’s the ultimate environment to be in.

“Van had been singing many of these songs for 20/30/40 years, so the last thing he wanted to do was sing the songs the same every night. At heart, he’s a jazz musician, so every night the songs will be different. He might change the key, he might change the feel, he might invite you to come up with new horn lines. That was an amazing thing to be part of – you’re constantly being tested and pulled in musical directions that you don’t really expect. Now, there are no artists really like that.

“The kind of people and the school Van’s from of Ray Charles and James Brown… we talk about Van singing and his songwriting, but very rarely do we talk about his role as a band leader, the ability to have a collection of musicians, bring them together and to sound like one cohesive musical unit.

“I remember the first day, I walked into the sound check and I saw Georgie Fame sitting at the Hammond organ. I remember thinking, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Georgie Fame.’ All the people in the band were musical superheroes and yet he brought them together under the umbrella of his songs and arrangements. To see that and suddenly be part of it was absolutely amazing.

“Some of the recording sessions we did were like gigs. We were touring around Ireland, there was a day off, and Van said, ‘Hey, I booked a studio.’ We’d been kicking around some new songs in sound checks and he booked a studio. Normally, when you record an album, maybe the rhythm section would go in first, and the singer would put some guide vocals down, then you might add horns or strings – you build it piece by piece. Well, we walked into this studio in Dublin, and it had been set up like a gig.

“At that point, it wasn’t a small group. There were two drummers, two bass players, a percussion player, three singers, four or five horns, and we’re all set up live. I think in that day, we pretty much recorded the whole of The Healing Game album. The red light went on, and you ended up with a recording where Van knows exactly what he wants: he’s pointing to people for solos, he’s saying, ‘Give me some long notes there,’ he’s constantly orchestrating as he goes along. But when those songs are performed live with him, he doesn’t necessarily want to do them the same way again. He changes the arrangements, the feel, sometimes even improvises the lyrics. To be part of that process is absolutely extraordinary. I know it sounds so cheesy, but I do feel very lucky to have experienced that.

“Van is brilliant at assembling different musicians from different musical backgrounds. There was a guy in the horn section called Pee Wee Ellis. It was a name I knew, but I didn’t know what he looked like. I walked in and someone said, ‘This is Pee Wee Ellis.’ And I thought, ‘As in the James Brown Pee Wee Ellis? It can’t be the same bloke.’ But it was. He’d written Cold Sweat with James Brown, and he was standing in the horn section next to me. It’s ridiculous. And then one day you turn up and it’d be Fred Wesley from The JBs on trombone or Candy Dulfer would walk in and join the horn section. This constant attraction of amazing musicians to the flame of Van’s songs, that draws people in, because, to play these songs as a musician is amazing.

Leo Green: “They’re such great songs to get your teeth into, and they can take any kind of musical arrangement.”

“They’re such great songs to get your teeth into, and they can take any kind of musical arrangement. I didn’t find it nervous. It’s like Christiano Ronaldo saying, ‘Do you want to come and have a kick about?’ Imagine walking in and you’ve got Georgie Fame, or Alec Dankworth on bass… You just had to up your game. Also, I was very young at the time. I was 22/23 and a bit unaware. I’d spent two years with Jerry Lee Lewis, so when I came into Van’s musical environment, I just assumed that was normal, that you were expected to come up with things and interact musically with people. That was the job.

“What I love about the songs is that you’ve got this juxtaposition of the lyrics, which can be interpreted on any level you want. They can be as deep as you like, or not. But the music, the bare bones of the musical building blocks of those songs – even if he’s in the most intricate poetic verse – is classic rhythm and blues formulas. I don’t mean verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse. I mean, in terms of the musical structure, they’re not all 12-bar blues. There are a lot of gospel chord sequences in there, and there are a lot of sequences that you might hear in a jazz standard.

“If you look at something like Crazy Love or Tupelo Honey, look at that chord sequence, it’s not a million miles from something like, I Can’t Get Started [written by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke], which had been written in the 1930s and is from the Great American Songbook. What’s amazing about Van’s songs is that they now sit alongside those songs and don’t seem out of place. You forget that someone had to sit down with a blank piece of paper and write a song like, Have I Told You Lately, which has become a standard, or Moon Dance, or even the rock and roll stuff like Brown Eyed Girl.

“You can hear in those songs what Van was listening to growing up. I find that fascinating. Someone who, through his dad’s record collection, was hearing Louis Armstrong every day. Well, how does that manifest itself in a songwriter 20 or 30 years later? If fans heard, A Kiss To Build A Dream On, or When You’re Smiling, all those great standards, should we therefore be surprised that he turned out songs like Moon Dance that are drenched in jazz.

“Also, Van spent many years before he was big or famous working with John Lee Hooker and lots of the blues musicians that were coming over from America and using local groups to back them. Van’s band was probably the best blues band in Belfast. They were backing American musicians well into their 20s. There’s an album called Hymns To The Silence and there are songs on that album that you think could be John Lee Hooker songs, because it’s from that vein. I love the fact that Van’s songwriting pulls from all these different places and influences, and yet they still sound like Van Morrison songs. It doesn’t sound like he’s copying anybody, which is testament to the level of his songwriting. He’s absorbed all these songwriting influences, but what comes out the other side sounds like Van Morrison.

“As soon as you hear those opening bars of Have I Told You Lately… before he’s sung a note, you know exactly what you’re listening to. That’s something that you get from certain songwriters, whether it’s the Great American Songbook, Woody Guthrie, Jagger and Richards… you have that instant recognisability of songs.

“The other thing with Van, which I find amazing, is that Jagger had Richards, Bacharach had David, Leiber had Stoller, Lennon had McCartney. They were songwriting partnerships, but Van does the words and the music. Of course, there are people that have done that, but very few have done it to that level and produced this canon of work, which is vast and ever-growing. How he’s encompassed and taken on board, probably subconsciously, all those musical influences, I find that absolutely fascinating.

“When we work with these songs and take them apart… I think that’s probably why you could do any of Van’s songs with voice and piano, or voice and guitar, but equally, because of the harmonic structure, you could do the same song with an 80-piece orchestra. I think that’s a real sign of well-crafted, classic songwriting.

I struggle to pick a favourite record, because there’s something on every album that I get something out of, and it depends on what mood you’re in. I also think one of the most exciting things about him is you don’t know what’s coming next. As an artist, you have to believe that the best is yet to come, and I think as a songwriter, that’s what you work towards. With Van, the fact that there’s new material being written, I find that exciting.

“I obviously like the albums that feature horn sections… and the ones that I was lucky enough to play on. Days Like This was the first one I did, so that’s obviously special. The Healing Game, that was another one I love. But there are so many songs, and that’s part of the challenge with his work, what do you listen to?

“You’ve got the earlier albums where you’ve got quite raw rhythm and blues; I love those albums where what you can hear is this young guy who’s finding his musical feet, yet it’s fully formed. He’s written something like Gloria. In that song alone, you can hear all those blues musicians he’s been listening to. Not that long after that, Astral Weeks comes out. It’s down a completely different path, but it’s the same path; the chord structures are quite similar, but suddenly they’re being played on the double bass and jazz musicians are playing it, as opposed to the rock and roll guys that he was working with previously. The songwriting is kind of the same, it has that consistency. The chord sequences and structures are very similar, but the musical environment and road it takes us down are so different. I love that.

“When people find out you’ve worked with Van, they always say, ‘Oh, what’s he really like?’ And I always tell them to listen to the title track of The Healing Game. His songs aren’t all autobiographical, of course they’re not, that’d be crazy, but it’s about ‘50s music and coming from the street where you would have just been singing with your friends.

“The lyrics tell the story of Van’s childhood, growing up in Belfast, hearing early rhythm and blues and rock and roll. And then you pair that with the harmonic structure of the song, which is a doo wop song; the chords and the patterns, it’s like something out of the ‘50s. It’s incredible. So, when you put together Van’s lyrics, which tell you his story, perhaps, and the harmonic structure of a doo wop song, for me, that perfectly sums it all up: you’ve got the musical influences, you’ve got Van’s experiences, and you’ve got the arrangement. I would say to anyone who wants to know what Van Morrison is about, go and listen to The Healing Game.”

Kicking off with a special performance at London’s Adelphi Theatre on 30 September, The Van Morrison Alumni Band will be touring the UK this autumn. Ticket are available now via ticketmaster.co.uk

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