“I'm just a guy who sings songs,” Van Morrison insists on ‘Goldfish Bowl’, a denial of fame and the “media barons” who foist it on him. The visionary tendencies which marked him as considerably more than a song and dance man have been similarly renounced over the last 20 years, in the studio at least, replaced on the menu by sometimes meat and potatoes R&B. The jazz strand in his DNA has meanwhile also strengthened. This collaboration with veteran Hammond showman DeFrancesco is his second jazz release in five months, following Versatile. Purists who claim Morrison's no jazz singer because he doesn't improvise new harmonies à la Sarah Vaughan should listen instead to his smears and muffled growls on ‘Miss Otis Regrets’, his machine-gun scat on ‘Close Enough for Jazz’ and, especially, his enviable sense of swing and time. His audible pleasure in the company of DeFrancesco's band can leave him relaxed to a fault. He's uninterested in the horror Gregory Porter's recent version unearthed in the climactic lynching in ‘Miss Otis’, instead telling the tale with worldly distance. There's tough R&B in the style of his previous Hammond partner Georgie Fame which equally suits DeFrancesco, who joins Roberts' soprano sax in giving bite to Astral Weeks' ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’. ‘Magic Time’, meanwhile, has pockets of stillness which, like the nostalgic reverie ‘Memory Lane’ on Morrison's last LP of new songs, You Keep Me Singing, suggests old transports. These, and a craftsman's pleasure in his simplified singing work, will have to do till new visions come along.