The one musician Joni Mitchell called the pinnacle of music: “It seemed so far away”
The world of popular music always looked a lot different through the eyes of Joni Mitchell.
Whereas most people would be transfixed by anything that came over the radio at the time, Mitchell was an artist in every sense of the word, and the best musicians that she heard were ones who used different sonic colours that no one had ever thought of. So when she started making her own music, she was bound to be pulling from a more eclectic bunch of artists than the average rock and roll fan.
After all, Mitchell was suddenly going to start seeing The Beatles as the be-all-end-all for popular music. The Fab Four clearly did some fantastic things for pop music as a whole and introduced fresh ideas into the mix, but the depth of experimental music didn’t simply begin when the band started making Revolver and Sgt Peppers. They had company long before then, and that came from looking outside the realm of rock and roll.
Because before Mitchell even started playing rock and roll or even folk music, the classical giants were among the best acts that she had ever heard. Rachmaninoff was always a part of her record collection, and when she did finally decide to make tunes of her own, she wasn’t going down the same road Bob Dylan did. She wanted to sing what was in her heart, and that meant dismantling what role a guitar could have in her music.
A lot of what she was playing involved open tunings and was centred around suspended chords, which doesn’t always make for the most straightforward harmony. It was still beautiful, but Mitchell felt that it suited her music because of how many questions were still hanging in there. Not every part of life has a sense of finality to it, and if you look at the biggest names in jazz, they had already begun making more daring chords seem normal.
Any of those strange chords would have seemed alien to anyone trying to play a typical Rolling Stones song, but when listening to the likes of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, it was more about dancing around the chord changes than trying to stick to traditional cowboy chords. There were hidden emotions in those strange notes, and Mitchell felt no one else took that mentality further than Miles Davis.
There had been plenty of pop artists who were more successful, but Davis was the absolute peak of what a musician could be in her mind, saying, “Miles Davis’s music went into me at that time, and I was not a musician at that point. It wasn’t until years later that I got In A Silent Way and that sound in the music became the pinnacle of contemporary music for me. It seemed so far away from where I was. It wasn’t something that I actively pursued, but it eventually seeped in.”
And while that kind of influence can be heard all over her later records when she ended up working with Charles Mingus, Mitchell was far from the only one paying close attention to the jazz greats. Steely Dan created an entire band out of making their own takes on jazzy chords, and even looking at progressive legends like Pink Floyd, a song like ‘Breathe’ wouldn’t have existed if not for Richard Wright listening to Kind of Blue to get the right chords.
Davis’s music might not be the first thing that someone would throw on to get a radio hit, but for anyone looking to expand their craft, this kind of harmony is wildly adventurous to experiment with. But even if a typical pop musician could throw an odd chord into the mix to make their songs sound jazzy, no one has ever made those dissonant notes work with as much finesse as Davis did.
