The albums Joni Mitchell called her “all-time favorite records in just any field of music”
It was going to take a lot more than a bunch of cowboy chords to impress Joni Mitchell.
She may have had her start at the dawn of the singer-songwriter, but when comparing her music to the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, there was no question that she stood head and shoulders above everyone. Her music was far more sophisticated, and even if she was speaking their language, she wanted to move far beyond the traditional folksy songs that built rock and roll.
Because if you really break it down, there aren’t many Mitchell tunes that rely solely on the blues chords that everyone starts out with. ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ might be the closest thing to a straight rock and roll chord progression, but for the rest of her career, Mitchell sought to write with chords that had a lot more interesting notes than what she was hearing from everyone else. David Crosby was following her lead, but even he couldn’t imagine the kind of chords she was working with.
Most people had hardly even wrapped their heads around the idea of her making alternate tunings, much less the strange chords that it took to play in them. It would have been easier for her to stay in standard and make the same songs with regular chords, but if you lose those open strings, you lose a key part of her sound. Those suspensions are where her music came alive whenever she made records like Blue, and if she had it her way, she would have been pulling from jazz when she first got started.
She already had a healthy diet of classical music from when she was a kid, and while Chuck Berry was definitely one of the finest rock and roll singers of his time, Mitchell didn’t want to make music for people to dance to all the time. Her lyrics made people think, and it was easier to take the time to sit inside the music when you had players like Jaco Pastorius and Larry Carlton giving her a perfect bed on her fusion albums.
But even with someone like Wayne Shorter on the saxophone, it’s hard to recreate the kind of music that Miles Davis could do when he had a trumpet in his hand. Not everything that he played was necessarily easy to listen to, but looking through the cool jazz period of his sound, there are hardly any people on this Earth who could express the kind of feelings that he had whenever he crafted those beautiful lines.
Everything seemed perfect, and Mitchell pointed to records like In A Silent Way as some of the finest records ever made, saying, “I must admit that it was much later that Miles really grabbed my attention … and Nefertiti and In A Silent Way became my all-time favorite records in just any field of music. They were my private music; that was what I loved to put on and listen to—for many years now. Somehow or other, I kept that quite separate from my own music.”
You wouldn’t hear it in her music if you looked back on records like Blue or even Ladies of the Canyon, but there was a lot more going on with the way that Mitchell phrased her melodies. Her tunes may have had songs that weren’t all that straightforward, but her voice always gravitated towards notes that Davis would have recognised in an instant. It wasn’t all that easy to do, but you could hardly think of any other note that touched people’s hearts as deeply on either of their records.
Mitchell might be the first person to say that she wasn’t in the same league as Davis, but her back catalogue shows a woman who was able to hang with the greatest jazz greats the world had ever known. Rock and roll may have been the starting point, but she always had her eye on the bigger picture whenever she made her classics.
