The “most interesting” band Joni Mitchell heard in the 1970s
The key to all great Joni Mitchell music is her call to keep learning.
No one gets to the point where they simply stop trying to figure out new ways of playing, and all of Mitchell’s best records have involved her searching for that one chord that no one has thought of or going back to her favourite jazz records to find some sort of inspiration. But between the fantastic melodies on her records, though, Mitchell knew the best way to learn about new music is to surround herself with other musicians.
The whole appeal of music is being able to get into a room and play off each other, and when looking at the people that she’s worked with, it’s not like Mitchell didn’t set the bar high. She had already been working with people like David Crosby ever since she began, but as soon as she started leaving rock and roll and folk music behind, her next calling came from breaking out those old jazz records.
There was no way she was going to be the folk-rock incarnation of John Coltrane or anything, but listening to her music on Hejira is a better indicator of where her mind was. The conventional sounds of harmony that you got out of rock and roll wasn’t fun anymore, and it was time for the rest of the world to start moving on to more interesting artists than the standard arena rock fare.
It’s not that people like Peter Frampton or Eric Clapton were outright bad per se. They both got the people to show up in those stadiums for a reason, but Mitchell was looking for music that was more intimate. The chances of reaching every single heart in a stadium full of people by playing complicated jazz would have been impossible, but as far as Mitchell was concerned, she would have rather heard the biggest names in genres like fusion instead.
She had already been given the luxury of working with people like Charles Mingus, but the next step for that kind of music was working with artists like Allan Holdsworth or seeing what Brand X was doing overseas. Although that was a good starting point for people getting used to jazz rock, the kind of music that Weather Report was creating was exactly the kind of music Mitchell gravitated towards.
After going through the 1960s revolution, Mitchell felt that Weather Report was the best thing that came out of the next decade, saying in 1979, “Right now the group Weather Report, to me, is making the most interesting music. In my working with them now, while I feel a peer to them, I also feel a student to them in some ways. Not that I’m detracting from my own accomplishment, but I think of them as real musicians, and I think of myself as a painter.”
And it’s not that far off to how she uses many of her musicians. There are countless bassists who have been able to serve the song the way Mitchell wanted them to, but the free spirit that Jaco Pastorius had made him a kindred spirit with her in a lot of ways, always pushing outside the norms of the instrument and trying out whatever idea came into his head when interpreting one of her tunes.
Not all of the tactics worked and a few records may have left fans cold, but it’s not like Mitchell was ever going to apologise for her work. She had a few of the finest musicians in Los Angeles working with her, and even if fans couldn’t relate the same way they could listening to ‘Both Sides Now’, she would rather follow her own muse than try to give the people what they want all the time.
