Van Morrison
No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

VAN MORRISON – NO GURU, NO METHOD, NO TEACHER (Mercury, 1986)

After the mediocre, disappointing ‘A sense of wonder’ and before the not fully realized ‘Poetic champions compose’, the bard of Ireland pulls a splendid album out of the magical hat, imbued with a subtle sense of melancholy and a deep, sincere spiritual feeling.

The record opens with a typically Morrisonian ballad, “Got to go back”, where the presence of the orchestra is not overwhelming, but discreetly accompanies the undulating bluesy cadence of the composition. In the middle part, Van Morrison's mumbled and elongated voice conveys the trademark elegance and melodic sophistication. “Oh the warm feeling” follows, maintaining the general mood with which the album began; the sax winds and intertwines with the vocalists, aiming to deliver a spiritual and soft content: “And it filled with devotion and it made me plainly see and it healed all my emotions as I sat by you”. Curiously, the text brings to mind Franco Battiato's famous “E ti vengo a cercare”. “Foreign window” distills the beautiful insights present in the previous tracks and transports us to a wonderful Astral Weeks-like territory, filled with atmosphere and talented harmonizing around a simple chord progression. The lyrics are perhaps the best crafted, religious but not cloying: the gaze focuses outside the window, because the mystical experience is possible only in a state of introspection and full awareness of one's involved interconnectedness with the beyond. Consistently and consequentially, the tracks “A town called Paradise” and “In the garden” continue this sort of homogeneous suite; as one can infer merely from the titles, biblical references abound, embedded among allusions to feelings like nostalgia, solitude, and freedom. Especially In the garden offers a complex weave: rich and peaty voice, halting and breathless words, hinted piano arpeggios, flashes of evocative imagery: The streets are always wet with rain after a summer shower….

The myth of Oisin, the most prominent and known among those of Irish tradition, has the Underworld – Tir na nog, indeed – as a borderland, without frontiers and without limits, inhabited by eternal and joyful creatures; “We've been together before in a different incarnation and we loved each other then as well…”. The musical texture here is more distinctly folk, also thanks to the steady and repetitive progression of the guitars, interspersed with a sudden echo of violas and orchestral instrumentation; the central theme merges with the choruses thanks to Morrison's singing, almost external, highlighting the delicacy of the entire textual operation. Equally well placed in the project are Here comes the knight and Thanks for the information, which prelude to the grand finale; a mature and aware author writes: “Thanks for the information never give a sucker an even break when he’s breaking through to a new level of consciousness”. One Irish rover thrusts us inside some isolated mansion where a boy silently listens to a tale speaking of light and high consciousness of being. The incipit (“tell me the story now…”) is worthy of a true bard who rightfully earns his place in the parliament of poets. The album concludes with Ivory tower, whose lively and captivating opening enchants and seduces.

For those wishing to approach Van Morrison's music, this work almost didactically opens up every possibility: we find both the more archaic aspect of inspiration and the original melodicism that will characterize the artist's production until the late nineties. But here the sticky rhetoric and the syrupy taste, which unfortunately will mark many other albums of this period, are absent. In “No guru”, Morrison achieves a balance reached only a few other times before, such as in the unsurpassable and already mentioned Astral Weeks or the wonderful Moondance, and the very successful Veedon Fleece. The album is among the four or five masterpieces in the entire discography of the Irishman, for this reason, it is unreservedly recommended not only to listen to but also to purchase, being an essential presence in a respectable collection.