The one musician Joni Mitchell was addicted to: “Like no one else”
While her work is considered to be vital to the world of folk music, it’s hardly a secret that jazz has always informed Joni Mitchell just as much as this other traditional form.
Mitchell had been showing small signs of her infatuation with jazz from the start of her career, but this began to truly flourish during the middle of the 1970s with the release of classic records such as Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Both of these still stay relatively true to her acoustic folk roots, but it was certainly the beginning of a shift towards where her work was on the verge of going.
After this point, she would then allow this influence to completely consume her work, and some of her albums in the late ‘70s are perhaps even better thanks to this influence. Beginning with Hejira, moving on through Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and her tribute album to Charles Mingus, which appropriately shared the legendary bandleader and bassist’s surname as its title, it was clear that Mitchell had all but abandoned her early sound in order to reinvent herself as a jazz artist.
Not only was her own playing style on both piano and guitar beginning to alter itself as a result of this, but she started working alongside many jazz musicians in order to create her albums, with the sound beginning to incorporate more complex arrangements which required the use of traditional jazz instrumentation.
One notable connection she had was with the members of fusion group Weather Report, with bassist Jaco Pastorius first appearing on Hejira with his trademark fretless sound. After this collaboration, she would eventually introduce his bandmates, the percussionists Alex Acuña and Manolo Badrena, along with another player who she considered to be one of the most influential figures to have appeared on her later releases.
Given how he appeared on every record of hers between 1977’s Don Juan to 2002’s Travelogue, it was clear that Mitchell had developed an obsession with saxophonist Wayne Shorter. While he is perhaps best known for his work with Weather Report, he also spent time performing as a sideman in the bands of Miles Davis in his Second Great Quintet, while also contributing to releases by Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard.
While speaking to CBC Television in 2000 as part of the promotion for her album, Both Sides Now, she proclaimed that her relationship with Shorter was unlike any other she had established throughout her career, and that he has helped her in so many ways since they first played together.
“Wayne is indispensable to music because there’s no one like him,” she proclaimed. “When I finish a project […] he’s the guy that does the decorative work on the ceiling, so to speak. I like to watch him crawl across the music. He explores it like no one else.”
She continued to praise him, adding: “You can always hear what he’s relating to at any given moment – ‘Oh, he’s relating to that part; oh, he’s relating to the voice; oh, he’s relating to that chord.’ He just took it apart and added his own deconstructed version of it. There’s no one like Wayne on the planet – and there never has been. He’s a total individual. I’m addicted to him.”
While there have undoubtedly been many musicians who have been key to helping Mitchell establish new sounds at various points in her career, there is arguably nobody who has been as instrumental to her flourishing during her jazz period as Shorter was. The loss of a talent like him in 2023 is not just something that Mitchell would be despairing of, but something that the entire jazz world will have mourned.
