Van Morrison & The Chieftains

Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer, Van Morrison is among popular music's true innovators, a restless seeker whose incantatory vocals and alchemical fusion of R&B, jazz, blues, and Celtic folk produced perhaps the most spiritually transcendent body of work in the rock & roll canon. Subject only to the whims of his own muse, his recordings cover extraordinary stylistic ground yet retain a consistency and purity virtually unmatched among his contemporaries, connected by the mythic power of his singular musical vision and his incendiary vocal delivery: spiraling repetitions of wails and whispers that bypass the confines of language to articulate emotional truths far beyond the scope of literal meaning. George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on August 31, 1945. The original traditional Irish folk band, as far as anyone who came of age in the 1970s or 1980s is concerned, is the Chieftains. Their sound, built largely on Paddy Moloney's pipes, is otherworldly, almost entirely instrumental, and seems as though it comes out of another age of man's history. The Chieftains were first formed in Dublin during 1963, as a semi-professional outfit, from the ranks of the top folk musicians in Ireland. The group's big breakthrough in America occurred when they provided the music for Stanley Kubrick's 1975 movie, Barry Lyndon. The band has kept its sound fresh with the periodic addition of new members, interweaving the group with orchestras, American folk and country musicians, rock musicians and a search for sounds beyond the boundaries of Ireland - as distant as Spain - as sources for its music.