The jazz song Joni Mitchell was too scared to do: “Kind of like a sacrilege”
Recently, during an episode of Far Out’s Existential Boozer, comedian John Kearns said he thinks people who claim to have no regrets in life are, at best, in denial and, at worst, crazy. As very much an average person, I felt inclined to agree, thinking of all the missed opportunities in my life, but projecting it onto someone as iconic as Joni Mitchell, well, I’m not so sure.
This is a musician who has rung every ounce of potential out of her own life, not just from a career perspective, but also that of adventure. From the very moment she decided to pursue a career in music, she has rarely left a stone unturned and has embarked on countless adventures that have placed her in the most extreme positions in life.
Her career has taken her on a whistle-stop tour of every iconic cultural era, and through that, she’s lived in almost every iconic city that was experiencing its “moment”. So, to return to Kearns’ adage, I can’t help but feel like Mitchell is immune to those trappings.
But Mitchell cites one moment in her career, where she allowed a sliding door to pass by her through the most relatable of human emotions: fear. Mitchell was presented with the opportunity to collaborate on a rare project with jazz musician Charles Mingus, when the cold arms of panic grappled around her, and prevented her from stepping forward into this unknown breach.
“I got word through a friend of a friend that Charles had something in mind for me to do,” Mitchell explained. She continued, “I called him up to see what it was about, and at that time he had an idea to make a piece of music based on TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, and he wanted to do it with, this is how he described it – a full orchestra playing one kind of music, and overlaid on that would be bass and guitar playing another kind of music; over that there was to be a reader reading excerpts from Quartet in a very formal literary voice; and interspersed with that he wanted me to distill TS Eliot down into street language, and sing it mixed in with the reader.”
She added, “It was an interesting idea; I like textures. I think of music in a textural collage way myself, so it fascinated me. I bought the book that contained Quartet and read it, and I felt it was like turning a symphony into a tune.”
Adding, “I could see the essence of what he was saying, but his expansion was like expanding a theme in the classical symphonic sense, and I just felt I couldn’t do it. So, I called Charles back and told him I couldn’t do it; it seemed kind of like a sacrilege.”
Mitchell was given a chance to redeem herself in 1979, she collaborated with Mingus on what one might call a more accessible project. Mingus had written the compositions for six songs, which he asked Mitchell to perform and provide lyrics for, which she did, and it ended up becoming the record Mingus.
But as regret does for all everyday people, the passed up chance to adapt Four Quartets with Mingus would have undoubtedly lingered away in the brilliant mind of Mitchell.
