Van Morrison continues the jazz tendencies of Versatile on You’re Driving Me Crazy, a collaboration with the late trumpeter, organist and general virtuoso Joey DeFrancesco. In fact this is an even looser, liver and more sprawling exercise than Versatile, as Van continues to dig deeper into the ensemble spirit, presenting himself as just one voice amongst many. There are long instrumental displays and digressions, with DeFrancesco’s sweet brass tones and plaintive organ ripples front and centre. Beyond a certain point the choice of songs is immaterial – Van’s albums are starting to feel like so many set lists now, with many of the same numbers cropping up again and again in different iterations.

What does set You’re Driving Me Crazy apart is that it’s probably the closest Van has come to a straight jazz album. When you compare it to Roll With the Punches, the range is quite remarkable, especially at this later stage in his career. That said, the continuity between them is just as striking, since Van has now carved out a sweep spot all of his own, best described on “Goldfish Bowl,” one of the enduring tracks from What’s Wrong With This Picture?, reinterpreted once more here: “Jazz, blues and funk/That’s not rock and roll/Folk with a beat/And a little bit of soul.”

As always, “Close Enough For Jazz,” which originally featured on Too Long In Exile, becomes a litmus test for how Van modulates from album to album in the late 2010s. In this version, Van scats for several minutes before gasping for breath and laughing at the end. He does a fair bit of vocalising generally, seemingly enjoying the way in which DeFrancesco and the band challenge him to keep up. Often they seem to be leading him rather than the other way around, incentivising him to remain supple in his old age, and the effect is quite charming.

Two of the album highlights involve Van standards. There’s a radical reinvention of “Have I Told You Lately” that divests it of the mystical romanticism of Avalon Sunset and transforms it into a boppy big band number, not unlike the way Bryan Ferry reimagined some of his sultrier works in a 1920s style on 2012’s The Jazz Age. Likewise, DeFrancesco displaces the brass flourishes that distinguished the original version of “The Way Young Lovers Do” and leads the way for Van to visit it afresh. In this version it sounds closer to “Moondance” than to anything on Astral Weeks.

Van is also compelling when he strains his voice into high plaintive arcs, as occurs on his cover of “Miss Otis Regrets,” the opening track, as well as on “Evening Shadows” and, of course, “Close Enough for Jazz.” Still the album does have a sameness to it – the downside of Van’s seamless fusion of genres is that all of his music is starting to feel somewhat adjacent at this point in his career, even outlier genre exercises such as the country of Pay the Devil or the blues of Roll with the Punches. Nevertheless, You’re Driving Me Crazy nails the late night intimacy it aspires to, and Van’s voice is as remarkable as ever.