The one musician Joni Mitchell called too perfect to touch: “Like sacred terrain”
It’s impossible to really copy what Joni Mitchell did whenever she made a record.
Even though you can hear a lot of her influences in the songs that she was singing, the majority of her work feels like her complete vision, to the point where any of her copycats can often wear her influence a little too much on their sleeve a lot of the time. Her music was singular compared to everyone else out at the time, but the goal of any artist is always about trying to make something that doesn’t fit in anyone else’s league.
And when you look at the way that Mitchell moved throughout her career, she wasn’t willing to be defined by one set genre of music. She had a great deal of respect for rock and roll and folk music when she began, but that was only a small helping of what she could do. Her music gravitated towards the kind of notes that people didn’t always touch, and when you look at the way that a lot of her best songs unfold, it’s almost like listening to her create a musical painting half the time she plays.
It’s easy for her to paint those pictures when having artists like Jaco Pastorius and Larry Carlton in her corner, but some of the greatest pieces she ever made have also come from the jazz world. She was never a stranger to making jazz music whenever she worked on records like Hejira, but the idea of working with someone like Charles Mingus did have a lot more nuance to it than simply having a bunch of songs ready to go.
She knew that her music needed to match her contemporaries whenever she worked them out, and you can hear her trying everything she can to do service to the legends that came before her. But while Mingus could give his approval over the kind of music that Mitchell made with him, there was still a lot more to explore every single time that Mitchell put on any of Miles Davis’s albums.
Because, really, Davis came from the same school Mitchell did in terms of always reinventing himself. He didn’t want to be known as a simple jazz musician for the rest of his life, and while he did have some of the most beautiful albums of the genre under his belt, like In a Silent Way, records like Bitches Brew were proof that he could hold his own next to other musical revolutionaries like Jimi Hendrix.
Mitchell definitely had her own trip by the time that she began working in jazz, but she knew that Davis’s work was almost too perfect for anyone else to try and touch, saying, “Miles almost seems like sacred terrain, you know, nobody seems to get mad that people rip off Coltrane, but it seems like a sacrilege to rip off Miles.”
“It sticks out like a sore thumb. You’re a second-rate Miles as soon as you put a harmon mute. So far, unless some guy puts it in and pushes air through it and some – I don’t know in some like new way.”
Joni Mitchell
And the same goes for so many other legends in the music industry as well. Anyone who has ever tried to explore open tunings is going to come back to Mitchell’s vocabulary the same way that virtuoso guitarists are going to try to copy Eddie Van Halen, but the goal that Mitchell was always striving for was being able to take all of those disparate influences and turn them into something that only you can do.
It’s not an easy task, and most people fail trying to find something remotely original, but Davis was the kind of standard that anyone could point to when looking at someone who did everything they could with their artistry. Half of the greatest artists of all time can spend time spinning their wheels, but Mitchell wanted the chance to make the kind of daring moves that David did throughout his career.
