The most “pure” musician Joni Mitchell ever heard
The art that Joni Mitchell made always went beyond being a catchy single.
She had studied under some of the greatest musicians in their field, and nothing that she made needed to be the same old tired singer-songwriter tunes about love lost. She certainly touched on her innermost feelings every time she made a record, but she was more interested in creating the kind of musical textures that no one had ever heard of before.
Or at least, sounds that the charts hadn’t heard of before. You see, a lot of what Mitchell did came from genres that were as far away from rock and roll as possible, and while she did have a healthy respect for many of the greatest stars of her time, it’s hard to think of her as fitting in the same ballpark when listening to what she could do on records like Court and Spark. She was a true original, and not even the greatest in their field could have managed to have the same kind of harmony that she was working with.
Although a lot of that came from the way that she tuned her guitars, her way with melody was all descended from the greatest players in jazz. There were plenty of singer-songwriters that caught her ear when she first started, but when listening to her discuss the greatest artists of all time, she was more than happy to put someone like Miles Davis in that list more often than someone like Bob Dylan.
Both of them were equally talented at what they did, but what Davis was doing was about the raw mechanics of harmony. The kind of jazz players that he was working with were so good that the music almost seemed to drip off of them half the time, and while that did make for absolute magic when they actually managed to get those sounds down on record, Mitchell knew that nothing that Charlie Parker ever played was going to be the same.
While you can hear the history of a lot of the greatest guitarists in rock, for example, Mitchell couldn’t think of a single thing that Parker played that wasn’t completely natural, saying, “There aren’t many things in music that pure. Charlie Parker played pure opera of his soul – especially the times that he was extremely sick. He had no defenses. And when you have no defenses the music becomes saintly and it can communicate.”
That’s not to say that there aren’t many people that could do the same thing with their own music. What Parker did was strictly from the heart, and when looking at the greatest artists of every generation, each of them seemed to have that same sense of artistic honesty whenever they performed.
It’s easy to focus on the raw vulnerability of Mitchell’s own Blue as a good example, but not every album like that is cut from the same cloth. No rock and roller tries to sound like Charlie Parker, but the way that he played is the kind of vulnerability that’s tough to put your finger on but know it when you see it. It’s the kind of mix of sorrow and joy that made everything from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska to Nirvana’s Nevermind sound so damn good whenever they came out of the speakers.
Because in every single case here, it’s not about trying to write a song that was going to take over the world. Every artist behind those albums wanted to make a musical document or where they were, and decades later, people are still peeling back the layers of what they captured on their greatest works.
