PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
Recently, I have been checking up on Joni Mitchell. I knew that in 2015 she had suffered from a ruptured brain aneurysm. Alone in her Bel Air home, it took a few hours for her unconscious body to be discovered. For a time, they thought that she wouldn’t make it. But Joni is a fighter, and as the months passed, she slowly regained her ability to speak. Now, she participates in daily rehabilitation and is learning to walk again. Her first public appearance following the aneurysm was in August 2018 at a concert featuring her friend, the late Chick Corea. Then, there were appearances at “Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration” again in 2018 and at the Annual NAMM Technical Excellence & Creativity Awards in 2020, where she received the “Les Paul Innovation Award”. And recently, there have been long and relaxed chats with Clive Davis and Cameron Crowe. It seems like a miracle!
I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell in the 1970s and 1980s. Together with Carole King and Laura Nyro, she was the muse of my youth. Joni had three watershed moments in her career.
The first was the release of the introspective and highly personal “Blue” in the summer of 1971. Together with Carole’s landmark “Tapestry” (on which Joni sang backup), it forms the backbone of the singer/songwriter movement.
The second was the release of her commercial smash, the multi-platinum “Court and Spark,” in January of 1974. Spawning her only top ten single “Help Me’ (number 7 on Billboard) and also “Free Man in Paris” (number 22), the album peaked at number 2 for four weeks and was extremely unlucky not to have made number one, being kept from the top spot by no less than three different albums – Bob Dylan’s “Planet Waves” (weeks 1 and 2), Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” (week 3) and John Denver’s Greatest Hits (week 4). This chart factoid (an album spending four weeks at number 2 while three albums exchanged the top slot with one another) was a record at the time. It remained so until 1987, when Whitesnake’s eponymous album repeated the honor.
The third was the release of her masterpiece, “Hejira,” in November 1976. Joni has always been a Renaissance woman. Initially setting her sights on becoming a painter (and she is an exceptionally talented painter), she changed her first name from Joan to Joni so as not to be confused with the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell (Joni was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada). Labeled initially as a folk singer, then as a more mainstream pop/rock artist, starting around her 1972 album “For the Roses”, Joni became fascinated with and began experimenting with Jazz. By “Court and Spark,” she was starting to shift from using traditional LA rock session musicians to primarily jazz musicians, most notably the saxophonist Tom Scott (Carole King’s “Jazzman” and Steely Dan’s “Aja”) and his band “The LA Express”.
Then, in 1975/1976, Joni met the brilliant but troubled electric jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, and “Hejira” was born. Pastorius was a member of the jazz fusion group Weather Report from 1976 to 1981; he also collaborated with Joni on three additional albums. His bass playing featured heightened bass chords and innovative harmonics. Joni was blown away when she heard him play and decided to overdub his electric bass onto the album tracks. The results were astounding. “Hejira” became a jazz album with a haunting, free-flowing, liquid feel that has never been matched. Unfortunately, this gifted man – the most outstanding electric jazz bassist of all time – died in 1987 of brain injuries obtained in a bar fight.
PART TWO: THE SONGS:
Joni wrote all songs except where noted.
Big Yellow Taxi/Just Like This Train/Night Ride Home/Crazy Cries of Love/Harry’s House/Black Crow/Amelia/Hejira/Sex Kills/The Magdalene Laundries/ Moon at the Window/Facelift/ Why Do Fools Fall in Love*/Trouble Man**/ Comes Love***/Song for Sharon/ Woodstock/Dreamland
TRACK 2 Court and Spark (1974)
TRACKS 6,7,8,16 “Hejira” (1976)
TRACKS 1 and 17 “Ladies of the Canyon” (1970)
TRACKS 9 and 10 “Turbulent Indigo” (1994)
TRACK 11 “Wild Things Run Fast” (1982)
TRACK 5 “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” (1975)
TRACKS 4 and 12 “Taming the Tiger” (1998)
TRACK 3 “Night Ride Home” (1991)
TRACK 18 “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” (1977)
*TRACK 13: Originally on Joni’s second live album “Shadows and Light” (1980) “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” (Lymon/Santiago/Merchant)
** TRACK 14: Originally on Kyle Eastwood’s 1998 EP “From There to Here”. “Trouble Man”(Marvin Gaye)
*** TRACK 15 Originally on Joni’s salute to the Great American Songbook “Both Sides Now” (2000) “Comes Love” (Brown/Stept/Tobias)
PART THREE: THE CONCERT
Joni has made three live albums.
The first, “Miles of Aisles”, was released at the height of her popularity, in late 1974, following the enormous success of “Court and Spark”. Like its predecessor, it was a smash, reaching the number 2 spot within a few weeks of its release (the charts moved quite a bit slower in those days). Unfortunately, it’s a disappointment; many rate it as one of Joni’s lesser achievements. Recorded primarily in giant stadiums during the “Court and Spark” tour, Joni is uncomfortable in this setting and has little rapport with her audience. A double album, it’s at once too long and not long enough and, amazingly, contains only a single track from “Court and Spark”, the gorgeous “People’s Parties”.
Her second, “Shadows and Light,” recorded at the Santa Barbara Bowl in September 1979 and released in September 1980, is also a double album, but it’s much better. Although part of the “Mingus” (a weak and indulgent Joni) tour, there is enough material from “Hejira,” “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” and “Court and Spark” to keep you interested, and Jaco really shines in both his harmonies with Joni and his extended solos.
The third, “Painting with Words and Music,” is from 1998 (released by Rhino in 1999) and shows a more mature and relaxed Joni in a very intimate, gorgeous set built especially for her on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, CA. She is in the round, surrounded by the audience and her paintings. Toronto-based Canadian director Joan Tosoni does a marvelous job of gently keeping the focus on Joni, while occasionally cutting away to her band members and occasionally including close-ups of one of her paintings. It all works beautifully.
Opening with her best delivery of “Big Yellow Taxi”, which includes a sly take on Bob Dylan, she is in fantastic form, and the love going back and forth to her small audience is palpable. You know that you are in for a hell of a good evening. It also helps that the show is built around “Hejira”. Of the nineteen tracks, four are from this album: the title track, “Black Crow”, “Amelia,” and “Song for Sharon”. It is the only one of her albums that she refers to by name as she banters about that beautiful title – the “Hejira” is Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina – and her attraction to the long dangling “J”, a year before Steely Dan did something similar on “Aja”. This is Joni at her peak with some of the most haunting lyrics ever written:
Amelia, I was driving across the burning desert when I spotted six jet planes leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain. It was the hexagram of the heavens; it was the strings of my guitar. Amelia, it was just a false alarm.
Song for Sharon: I went to Staten Island (Sharon) to buy myself a mandolin and saw the long white dress of love on a storefront manikin.
Black Crow: Diving down to pick up on any shiny thing, just like that black crow flying in a blue sky.
Hejira: I know no one‘s going to show me everything. We all come and go, unknown, each so deep and superficial between the forceps and the stone.
Her band is tight, featuring Mark Isham on trumpet (magnificent on the “Hejira” title track), Brian Blade on drums, her ex-husband Larry Klein on bass (replacing Jaco), and Greg Leisz on guitar.
Joni also interprets the material of other writers here. She does a lovely, slow, jazzy version of “Comes Love” and is clearly having fun harmonizing with friends on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” However, her knockout delivery of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man” from the 1972 film soundtrack is the standout. I guess you could call it Jazz-Soul Joni style. It sends you. It transports you, just as the rest of this remarkable document does. Please enjoy.
