Joni Mitchell named the jazz albums that were the “pinaccle of contemporary music”
As an artist, Joni Mitchell always rejected simple labels. As she once said, she exists “outside the laws” of any singular category.
Any artist can claim independence from such descriptions, but what makes Mitchell unique is that she was always venturing outside what people expected of her, defying reductive words like “confessional” by bringing together all aspects of her personal influences. Because therein lies the secret to Mitchell’s success: her gravitation towards all masters, regardless of genre or style.
Surrounded by other folk legends like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Mitchell was branded as a folk singer-songwriter early on. But she was always captivated by emotion and storytelling, incorporating new aspects into her sound wherever she could. In fact, Mitchell once said herself that she’s drawn to anything with “romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes”, which, as you’d expect, covers many revolutionaries, from the pioneers of classical music like Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky to leaders of the Modernist art movement.
It also included jazz. People trace Mitchell’s first foray into jazz music back to her 1974 record Court and Spark, before finding musical camaraderie in names like Jaco Pistorius and Don Alias. She eventually grew close to another hero of hers, Charles Mingus, forming a partnership that was best demonstrated on another of her jazz efforts, 1979’s Mingus.
Still, Mitchell later called her jazz work “much more my version of jazz”, which simply meant a version that wasn’t so cut and dry as much as it was her bringing together the styles that she loved and putting her own spin on it. After all, she’d also told Rolling Stone that she was breaking free from formulas others had imposed on her, and the result was creative freedom to do whatever she wanted, even if it would result in some scrutiny.
Another jazz great, Miles Davis, found his way to Mitchell before she even became a singer, when she’d often be given jazz records as currency for some of her earlier art commissions. Once, she received In a Silent Way and Nefertiti, which she argued became the “pinnacle of contemporary music” even though it seemed “far away from where I was” at the time.
These records eventually informed some of her approaches to Mingus, as did her endearment to Mingus himself, who often pushed for a more organic approach in his aversion to electronic techniques. In fact, that was the main point of contention with Mitchell and Mingus, with Mitchell wanting to adopt electronic instruments into the sound while Mingus wanted to do things a little differently.
Of course, this was also something that Mitchell knew well from her time in the counterculture movement, which taught her that people only felt against it because it was something new, not necessarily something bad. But change, according to Mitchell, is one of the gateways to success, and another reason why her incorporation of jazz tropes worked so well.
As she explained, “Not everybody is fluid and changeable. I am, Miles is. Some people thrive on change, but every time you change, you have to be ready to experience massive rejection. You have to be strong, and eventually, they catch up after the bad reviews and after they’ve driven you into obscurity. Ten years later, they go, ‘It’s genius.’”
