Why Jaco Pastorius was the perfect bass player for Joni Mitchell: “It was fantastic”
Joni Mitchell is an unparalleled force in songwriting. Over the course of a career spanning six decades, the Canadian lyricist has perfected the art of sonic storytelling, each song she creates bubbling over with poetry and personality. She won over generations of listeners with her vulnerable wanderings and longings, but her instrumental prowess is just as high-class as her lyrical talent.
Whole worlds of instrumentation sit just beneath Mitchell’s tales of love and loss. While she’s most well-known for the acoustic strums and gentle soundscapes of Blue, her talent for melody extends beyond the realm of folk. She’s experimented with everything from jazz to electronic, excelling each time. Her instrumentation is as timeless as her lyricism.
As such a talented multi-instrumentalist herself, Mitchell needed an equally adept band around her when it came to performing and recording. She needed to surround herself with people who could understand her vision and match her musical prowess. Though she collaborated with some impressive bassists in her early years, including Wilton Felder and Stephen Stills, it was a role that she struggled to fill with the right person.
It was only when Mitchell came to her sixth record, 1974’s Court and Spark, that she stumbled upon the bassist she had unknowingly been looking for. During the album, one of the members of Mitchell’s rhythm section pointed her in the direction of jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, as she recalled during an interview for the 2014 documentary, Jaco.
“One of the guys in the section said to me, ‘Joni, there’s this really weird bass player in Florida,’” she recalled, “‘You’d probably like him.’” They were right. Mitchell was taken by the way Pastorius showcased the instrument, a style she had been hoping to emulate in her own music. “That’s what I wanted the bass to do,” she remembered, “I wanted it to show off a little more.”
As Mitchell was beginning to explore her own interests in jazz, it made sense that she was drawn to the playing of Pastorius. But it would be two years and two albums before Mitchell recruited the jazz bassist to play in her own band. She released Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, both of which explored her jazzier sound, before delving further into the genre with Hejira in 1976.
The wanderlust-driven album saw Mitchell finally pulling Pastorius into the studio with her, for the first of many collaborations. He contributed gorgeous bass-lines to tracks like ‘Coyote’, simultaneously cutting through and upholding her restless wonderings. The songwriter found that he fit her style seamlessly, which she suggested can alternate between “groove tunes” and more “classical” compositions.
“He did play like a tuba player sometimes…” she observed, “It was fantastic.” Mitchell was clearly taken by his playing, bringing him back to play bass throughout her jazzier era. He played with her for three more albums, culminating in the live album Shadows and Light in 1979, after which she looked to change her sound once more. But for those years, for that four album run, Pastorius provided Mitchell with the perfect playing for her bass-lines, showing the instrument off in the way it deserved.
