“I would rather distil the Bible”: the jazz project Joni Mitchell turned down
There are certain never-realised projects that will haunt us forever. Sofia Coppola’s take on The Bell Jar is undeniably one of them, and so is whatever Jeff Buckley would have done after Grace. Then, in one interview, Joni Mitchell, so casually and nonchalantly, threw out another great piece of art that never came to be.
While Mitchell is almost always labelled a folk artist, it doesn’t really do her justice. Even back in her earliest days, when her music was more traditionally in line with the genre, her vast influences meant that she was always colouring outside the lines. Then, by the late 1970s, the label felt totally futile, as if Mitchell existed in any one musical world, it was jazz.
The process seemed to begin way back in 1972 when Mitchell sat down and wrote ‘For The Roses’, fully intending it to be a goodbye to the music world. She truly believed that track would be her retirement note, but instead, she returned with a vengeance in 1974 with Court and Spark, making her music endlessly more dynamic. From that moment on, each record became more and more eclectic and more and more infused with the energy of the jazz world, rather than the tradition and legacy of folk.
By 1977, when she was making Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, her band was filled with jazz talents and her interest in that world had fully taken over. That’s when she got a call from one of her heroes – Charles Mingus wanted to talk to her.
Having heard her record, the jazz icon wanted to work with her. Eventually, what would come of the connection was her 1979 album, Mingus, that Mitchell finished after her collaborator’s death, working from the compositions he’d made for her.
But in 1978, in an interview with Rolling Stone, she revealed that wasn’t the original plan. “He had an idea for TS Eliot’s Four Quartets to be read, a symphony playing one kind of music and a small combo – an acoustic guitar, maybe myself, and a bass player doing an overlay of another kind of music,” Mitchell said, sharing that at first, the plan was a huge and literary undertaking.
He didn’t even want Mitchell to be a singer on the project, but to be the modern voice of the iconic author. “He wanted a formal, literary voice reading TS Eliot, and he saw me coming in as the colloquial voice of TS Eliot,” she said, explaining, “In the tradition of the Baptist church, they have a reader reading the Bible in the old way and somebody translating it into the colloquial.”
However, the second Mitchell dove into Eliot’s four-part project that was written over an extended six-year period, she knew she not only couldn’t do it, but really didn’t want to.
“I called him back and said I couldn’t do the project because, first of all, I would rather distil the Bible than TS Eliot,” she said, truly believing this Eliot project to be more meaty and mysterious than the holy text, with far too much to analyse and understand to ever be easily translated into some pieces of music.
Obviously, after rejecting Mingus, she thought that would be the end. She thought her chances were totally blown, but then a week later, her phone rang again. “He said he had written six melodies for me to set words to. He called them ‘Joni One’, ‘Joni Two’, ‘Joni Three’, up to six,” she said, and so the basis of Mingus was born, and the collaboration was set, even if it wasn’t the jazz legend’s initial plan.
