“So beautiful”: The musician behind one of the best notes Joni Mitchell ever heard
Everything that Joni Mitchell ever played was about more than making the best music that she could.
She was a musical wonder on almost every sense of the word, and even if the rest of the world struggled to figure out how the hell she managed to get a guitar to sound like that every time she made one of her records, it was always worth it to hear her pouring her heart out every single time she came out with a new song. But sometimes the purest emotions can come out in a single note better than an entire song.
But Mitchell wasn’t one to take the minimalist route whenever she made a record, either. She had a lot of practice working with some of the greatest folk songwriters of her generation, but since the best pieces of music she ever heard came from the likes of Rachmaninoff, it’s not like she was going to get the job done with one-chord vamps or anything like that. Bob Dylan already had that idea trademarked, and she was going to spend her time getting a lot more nuanced in her delivery.
The classics are the classics for a reason, but even when listening to records like Court and Spark, Mitchell wanted to wear some of her influences on her sleeve more than others. She had a deep love and respect for the greatest jazz musicians of all time, and while she was a long way from one day performing pieces with Charles Mingus, surrounding herself with the top session musicians in the world was a great way for her to get her foot in the door when working on her later records.
Then again, what Mitchell was doing involved a lot more than learning a couple of jazz progressions and going from there. She wanted to have a deeper understanding of what made some of her favourite records sound so good, and when you listen to what was coming off of one of Miles Davis’s masterpieces, she started to realise that a lot of the beauty comes from deep within the artist themselves.
No matter what kind of song Davis was working on, you could always tell when it was him at the centre of everything. Sure, other musicians like John Coltrane were able to do fabulous things when working on records like Giant Steps, but one of the greatest moments that Mitchell had ever heard came when she heard Davis doing the one thing every musician is afraid of: being out of tune.
When singling out her favourite tunes, Mitchell remembered there being a certain beauty in listening to the track ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ back in the day, saying, “At the very end of it, he draws the flattest note that is so beautiful. It is so right in it’s wrongness. The emotional quality because he flats it is so superb. If he’d played a nice note all the way out like technically perfect and so on, it wouldn’t have [worked].”
And it’s not like the rest of the world hasn’t taken a few cues from Davis. Plenty of other bands throughout rock and roll history have had tunes that are a little bit out of tune, but if it serves the song the right way or has the right kind of mojo, it’s no use trying to go over it and replace it with a note that is technically perfect.
Some would call that being lazy, but Mitchell knew the difference between artists who couldn’t be asked to fix their mistakes and those who actually wanted to be imperfect for the sake of the song. The ones that don’t get into the limelight are usually the ones who don’t know the difference between the two, but Mitchell figured that the best musicians could pick their musical battles a lot better.
