The singers Joni Mitchell said were out of everyone’s league: “I don’t know of anyone”
In the world of popular music, Joni Mitchell had a much different palette than what everyone else was working with.
Her generation may have grown up on rock and roll, but that was only a small portion of the kind of music that set Mitchell’s world on fire. She had a great deal of respect for the likes of Chuck Berry, but if anyone limited themselves to only one flavour of music throughout their career, they were going to be missing out on the true icons waiting on the horison.
And Mitchell was never the kind of person to put borders over what genres she listened to. After all, there are only two styles of music: good and bad, and while there are many tasteless people that try to put entire genres into the bad category, Mitchell figured that there was something to learn from every single genre that she pulled from. She was born in the folk tradition, but there were also genius things going on in the world of classical music that she learned before she even touched a guitar.
Rachmaninoff was still among her greatest influences, and when listening to the vocal leaps that she does, there is a symphonic edge to some of her greatest tunes. But if you were to look at the kind of music she made later on in her career, there wasn’t a single track she played that didn’t have some piece of jazz in it. That was the genre that she felt most comfortable in, and it wasn’t long before she began working with the legends of the jazz scene.
Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus suddenly became peers when working on some of her greatest albums, but when listening to the way that they work, it’s not like Mitchell was using her voice to improv like that. Her voice usually soared over anything that she worked on, and that came from her taking the time to listen to some of the greatest vocal legends in jazz like Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf.
None of them were exactly high on every pop singer’s list of influences, but there’s a certain kind of atmosphere that both women were able to create whenever they sang. Not everything needed to be an operatic vocal leap every time they played, but when listening to some of their greatest tunes, you can hear the reason why people saw the magic in them. The notes weren’t always difficult, but you could feel your heart ache every time they started to sing.
And as far as Mitchell was concerned, no one else has been able to top what they did, saying, “Both Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf had very difficult lives. And as the saying goes, a great tragedy hath humanised my soul. If you have been dealt with difficult changes in life and maintain a good heart and are also a good singer, there’s a tone created that cannot be faked.” She would go on to say, “Those women are still to this day. I don’t know of anyone in pop music with that kind of emotional depth.”
But that sense of depth that Mitchell’s talking about isn’t that hard to hear in her own music, either. There are plenty of times where she has been able to reach deep into her heart and pour something out for the rest of the world, and even by the standards of Holiday, you can feel that same sense of musical aching whenever listening to an album like Blue or the pure musicality of Court and Spark.
Then again, they are always going to be facsimiles of what Mitchell’s heroes were able to do. She could put herself in competition with some of the greatest jazz musicians and hold her own, but there is a limit where someone realises that their favourite artists are truly singular in their craft whenever they sing.
