Van Morrison arrived at the Montreux Jazz Festival in June 1974 with a full-force gale in his sails. It may have been a few years since he had a genuine charting hit in either the U.S. or the U.K. — the last time he cracked the Billboard Top Ten was in 1970 when the joyous "Domino" went to number nine — yet there was no denying he carved out his own distinctive niche within rock ‘n’ roll by blending his spiritual inclinations with earthy R&B, a combination that fueled an extraordinary run of records in the early ‘70s.