The music legend Joni Mitchell said sounded too boring: “People think he’s the greatest”
There’s a certain standard that anyone has to hit to make anything near what Joni Mitchell could do.
There have been countless singer-songwriters who paint brilliant character portraits, but when looking at the records that Mitchell made, you would swear that she was ripping specific pieces out of her heart for the world to see, half the time. That might have come from years of writing, but when she started spreading out in the late 1970s, it was much more about the people that she surrounded herself with every single time she played.
As much as she may have fit right in with the other fantastic songwriters in the 1970s rock scene, there was never the perfect place for her. She definitely had the right storytelling chops to put her on the same level as Leonard Cohen or Neil Young, but a lot of her greatest moments came from how she used harmony. No one could sound like her whenever she tuned to those opening tunes, and when listening to her voice in isolation, it feels like something you would have heard out of an old jazz record.
Which probably explains why she ended up working with so many people in the world of fusion. The best parts of her songs had always been about stretching pop music beyond the traditional chord structures, and when you have someone like Pat Metheny or Jaco Pastorius working alongside you, there’s no real limit on where you can go once you start making albums like Hejira.
But that was only one small step in Mitchell’s career. She was an avid fan of all forms of jazz, but whereas Miles Davis could touch on the greatest emotions with only one trumpet, Wayne Shorter seemed to be in a completely different league. His work with Steely Dan made for some of the greatest horn lines to ever turn up on a record, and when listening to him, Mitchell would have gladly forgotten all about people like John Coltrane.
That’s not to say that Coltrane was ever a hack when it came to jazz pieces. A Love Supreme and Giant Steps deserve a spot next to Kind of Blue and In a Silent Way in terms of pure jazz perfection, but that wasn’t what Mitchell was looking for. She needed a little more emotion behind it, and while Coltrane had a lot of precision, it was a lot harder for her to latch onto anything he was doing.
Shorter may have been following in their footsteps, but Mitchell felt Coltrane was far too boring to take seriously for too long, saying, “I don’t care for John Coltrane – many people think he’s the greatest. Coltrane seems like he’s on Valium to me. Charlie Parker, I see his greatness; then Wayne Shorter is a genius – he’s a tributary of ‘Trane, but he’s got so much more breadth and mysticism and wit and passion and everything.”
To say that about one of the jazz greats might sound insane, but it’s easy to see where some of the passion gets lost in a handful of Coltrane’s songs. A piece of ‘Giant Steps’ is technically brilliant and goes through some of the greatest chord changes that anyone has ever done, and yet when listening to it, most people new to jazz would either get ear fatigue or not be able to understand what they’re listening to.
So, really, Mitchell figured that someone like Shorter was a much better way for people to appreciate what jazz had to offer. Coltrane might be a legend that should be on any jazz fan’s list of all-time greats, but for her, it was much more about the kind of heart that you could hear in every note rather than the technical feats they could pull off.
