Joni Mitchell performs at Gershwin Prize Tribute Concert
This past week, legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was honoured with the Gershwin Prize in Washington, D.C. The iconic folk-jazz pioneer hasn’t been singing very much since her brain aneurysm back in 2015, but Mitchell has been making occasional live appearances in more recent years.
To help her celebrate the award, a number of Mitchell’s peers and admirers joined her at the concert. Some of the artists featured during the show included Cyndi Lauper, Herbie Hancock, Marcus Mumford, Brandi Carlile, and Ledisi. Also appearing were two of Mitchell’s most famous former flames: James Taylor and Graham Nash.
“She has had many, many difficulties in her life with polio when she was young,” Nash told the crowd. “And now there’s a brain aneurysm several years ago. But to see her come back and be singing again and playing again is incredible. I mean, talk about resilience.”
When Taylor took the stage, he went against the common perception of his relationship with Mitchell (which coincided with a period of heroin addiction) by claiming that their time together represented “one of the chapters in my life that I’m fondest of. She had a huge effect on me, on my work. And we collaborated during the year or so that we were together on a lot of stuff.” Taylor ended his speech with a simple proclamation: “Joni is a national treasure.”
Carlile was another star who offered her take on Mitchell’s influence. “It felt really feminine to me, really vulnerable, and it made me really uncomfortable, which is a reflection, I think, on my own ego and my coming of age in being a bit of a gender non-conforming person or just not really understanding the way that she was showing me, and all of us, the world,” Carlile explained. “And it wasn’t until I fell in love and met my wife that I realized how multi-dimensional Joni was as an artist.”
When it came time for Mitchell herself to take the stage, she surprised the crowd by singing two numbers that she knew well. Appropriately, the first was a version of George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, which the pair wrote along with lyricist DuBose Heyward for the opera Porgy and Bess. Mitchell had previously covered the song on pianist Herbie Hancock’s 1998 tribute album, Gershwin’s World. For her final number, Mitchell welcomed most of the artists who honoured her to do a group rendition of her Ladies of the Canyon closer ‘The Circle Game’.
Footage of Mitchell’s performance will be aired on PBS stations in America on March 31st.
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