ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in the title track, "nothing but a stranger in this world."
It also sounds like the work of a group of musicians who had become finely attuned to one another through years of working together - but, in fact, Morrison had made his name with rock songs like "Gloria" and "Here Comes the Night," and he sang "Astral Weeks," sitting by himself in a glass-enclosed booth, scarcely communicating with the session musicians, who barely knew who he was.
"Some people are real disillusioned when I tell them about making the record," says Richard Davis, who supplied what may be the most acclaimed bass lines ever to grace a pop record. "People say, 'He must have talked to you about the record and created the magic feeling that had to be there . . .' To tell you the truth, I don't remember any conversations with him. He pretty much kept to himself. He didn't make any suggestions about what to play, how to play, how to stylize what we were doing."
"I asked him what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I felt like playing," adds Connie Kay, the Modern Jazz Quartet drummer, who was also in the group assembled for the session. "We more or less sat there and jammed, that's all."
Kay was hired because Davis had suggested him; Davis got the nod because he had often worked with Lewis Merenstein, who produced the record and rounded up the musicians. Other musicians on the album include guitarist Jay Berliner, percussionist Warren Smith and horn player John Payne - all of them New York jazzmen and session players who knew nothing about Morrison and who rarely appeared on pop records.
At the time, Morrison's solo career was just getting under way; earlier he had let the rough rock and R&B band Them. Until he signed with Warner Bros., to make "Astral Weeks," the mercurial Irishman didn't even have a deal with a major American label, though he had made a few solo recordings, including the sunny pop hit "Brown Eyed Girl" and the scarifying "T.B. Sheets," a ten-minute dirge about a friend's death from tuberculosis.
The songs he brought into New York's Century Sound Studios were a far cry from those earlier tunes. They were long, most of them, and meandering, suffused with the pain of the blues and the lilt of traditional Irish melodies. Morrison depicted the streets of Belfast in a dim, hallucinatory light, peopled with characters who danced like young lovers and spun like ballerinas but who mostly struggled to reach out to each other and find the peace and clam that otherwise eluded t
