The one artist Joni Mitchell “tried everything” to work with
The music of Joni Mitchell was never meant to stay in one specific box during her peak years.
She had grown up in the same scene that had gifted the world artists like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but Mitchell wasn’t about to spend the rest of her life strumming away on her acoustic guitar playing folk tunes. There were a lot more avenues to go down, and she always wanted to follow the kind of music that excited her before anything else.
But when Mitchell did eventually transition into other styles, she was going to need the right people behind her. Even David Bowie needed the help of Mick Ronson when transitioning into glam rock and worked with Trent Reznor to become a star in the 1990s, so if she wanted to expand her palette, she wanted to have a lot more focus on the world of jazz than folk half the time.
And given where she started, jazz isn’t that far out of the norm for her. Her melodies were always so sophisticated, even in her earliest days, and when looking at the way that she framed a lot of her lyrics, it had the same kind of nuanced look at the world that would have fit right in alongside the John Coltranes of the world.
It’s not like she was struggling to find the right people to work with. Larry Carlton was already a humongous star in the session world, and when listening to Jaco Pastorius’s bass on Hejira, you would swear that both his instrument and Mitchell’s voice were made for each other, especially in between the breaks in the vocal where he plays through all those gorgeous bass harmonics.
Everyone from that scene was well above anyone else’s track record, but Miles Davis almost felt too good for any standard singer-songwriter. Davis may have admired a lot of rock and roll acts and even reached out to work with everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimi Hendrix at the peak of their career, but when looking back on her collaborations, Mitchell thought it was a shame that she never got to see the master in action.
Davis had already been familiar with Mitchell’s work and loved it, but one caveat managed to get in the way of their collaboration, with Mitchell recalling, “I said to his brother Eugene, ‘Miles would never play with me because I was white.’ If I’d known that when he was living, I would have just stayed out. I would have approached him differently. I would have given him the bare track [without vocals] because see, a lot of my taste in music comes from loving Miles. I tried everything.”
Even if it didn’t pan out between Mitchell and Davis, it’s not like she had to worry about getting the respect of her jazz peers. Wayne Shorter had already played his best work when working with Mitchell, and even if she wasn’t as demanding of her players all the time, it was clear that everyone who worked with her needed to see the bigger picture of what she needed to do before they even picked up their instruments.
When looking at how Mitchell approached her later work, though, many of her finest moments came from referencing back to people like Davis. The folk scene may have never forgotten about her, but Mitchell had a much broader perspective on her music than strictly playing an acoustic guitar and telling her listeners a story.
