TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. A new anthology of recordings by composer, singer, guitarist, pianist and painter Joni Mitchell is called "Joni's Jazz." She's pictured on the cover alongside friends and star collaborators Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. FRESH AIR's jazz historian Kevin Whitehead says, of all the songsters who passed through the 1960s folk scene, Mitchell has been the biggest influence on jazz singers, and she has the deepest jazz connections.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE TEA LEAF PROPHECY (LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS)")
JONI MITCHELL: (Singing) She plants her garden in the spring. He does the winter shoveling. Now, there's three of them laughing around the radio. She says, I'm leaving here, but she don't go.
KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Joni Mitchell and saxophonist Wayne Shorter with pianist Herbie Hancock in 2007 on "The Tea Leaf Prophecy," a song about her parents. It's from the 61-track Mitchell-curated, chronologically scrambled anthology "Joni's Jazz," exploring her interactions with jazz musicians and influences. Mitchell and Hancock contribute short essays, but the set could use more extensive notes, considering a few tracks have no evident jazz connection. You might wonder why the set kicks off with "Blue" for Mitchell's solo if you didn't know her short vocal intro was inspired by Miles Davis' muted trumpet.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLUE")
MITCHELL: (Singing) Blue.
WHITEHEAD: Joni Mitchell says that as a singer, she learned more from Miles than anybody. Growing up on the Canadian prairies, she heard his LPs "Sketches Of Spain" and "Kind Of Blue," which informed her expansive sense of harmony. She also heard the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, with their tongue-twisting settings of bebop horn solos, gymnastics that'd leave a mark on her own timing. Mitchell covered Annie Ross' feature "Twisted" on the album "Court And Spark."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TWISTED")
MITCHELL: (Singing) They all laugh at angry young men. They all laugh at Edison and also at Einstein. So why should I feel sorry if they just couldn't understand the idiomatic logic that went on in my head? I had a brain. It was insane. Oh, they used to laugh at me when I refused to ride on all those double-decker buses all because there was no driver on the top.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: What? No driver on the top?
WHITEHEAD: Young Joni Mitchell sang and wrote poetry, so she started out in folk music 'cause that's where poets like Dylan and Leonard Cohen were. Songwriters edit words to fit the tune, but as Mitchell's verse got more complex, her melodies and rhythms began to follow the words as in a classical art song. She had already been tuning her guitar in various ways to facilitate the unstable chords she heard in her head. So to follow her edgy moves, she started using jazz musicians, studio players who moonlighted in pop jazz bands, The Crusaders and L.A. Express. Things really got rolling in 1976, when she hired the fretless bass guitar whiz from the jazz rock band Weather Report. Jaco Pastorius, with his burping tone and sliding pitches, was as slippery as she was.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OFF NIGHT BACKSTREET")
MITCHELL: (Singing) You give me such pleasure. You bring me such pain. Who left her long black hair in our bathtub drain?
WHITEHEAD: Then in 1978 came Joni Mitchell's most famous jazz encounter, putting lyrics to new and old melodies by the dying bassist Charles Mingus. Jaco Pastorius' electric bass was all wrong for that project, but Joni and Jaco had their own mojo going, and in the end, she had to do it her way, just as Mingus would have. Her album "Mingus" was uneven. Only three tracks appear on "Joni's Jazz." The best number, "Dry Cleaner From Des Moines," is the least Mingusy-sounding, with horns arranged by Jaco. Mitchell's virtuoso vocal is wide-ranging and rhythmically precise, even if you don't catch every word, her lyrics about a tourist in Vegas on a lucky streak.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DRY CLEANER FROM DES MOINES")
MITCHELL: (Singing) Des Moines was stacking the chips, raking off the tables, ringing the bandit's bells. This is a story that's a drag to tell, in some ways, since I lost every dime I laid on the line. But the cleaner from Des Moines could put a coin in the door of a John and get twenty for one. It's just luck.
WHITEHEAD: Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, Joni Mitchell's ally ever after. She'd bring him in toward the end of the recording process to dub in commentary at the margins. They discuss what he might play in terms of metaphors. For one spot, she told him, come in like you're super sad and go out like you're really young. On "A Bird That Whistles," shorter peeps in the background till the ending, when he expands into a whole flock of Waynes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A BIRD THAT WHISTLES")
MITCHELL: (Singing) If I don't have you darlin', birds don't mean nothin'.
WHITEHEAD: In truth, Wayne Shorter could be as underused on Joni Mitchell sessions as he often was in Weather Report. But her music's not about the solos. It's not, she said, like I'm trying to do jazz and getting it wrong. Still, when she stopped writing for a while, circa 2000, she recorded standards with a lush orchestra, echoing late-period Billie Holiday, another singer whose range narrowed but could still phrase a lyric. On "Comes Love," Mitchell lags behind the beat, then races to catch up, an old Bob Dylan move. But here she sounds more like a jazz singer than ever, in the lineage somewhere between Hollywood's Julie London and Joni fan Cassandra Wilson.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COMES LOVE")
MITCHELL: (Singing) Don't try hidin' 'cause it isn't any use. You'll just start slidin' when your heart turns on the juice. Comes a heat wave, you can hurry to the shore. Comes a summons, hide yourself behind a door. Comes love, nothing can be done.
WHITEHEAD: For all the jazzy touches, in the studio, Joni Mitchell assembled her music like a pop artist - layer by layer. She's also a lifelong painter, so she's thinking about surface and background textures and maybe a wash of sounds streaking one corner. So you may get, say, Wayne Shorter's soprano sax overpainting pedal steel guitar. That orchestral "Comes Love" makes oblique reference to Duke Ellington, celebrated for making music beyond category. That goes for Joni Mitchell too. Jazz, art songs, pop and folk traditions all feed her sound, but her fluid, airy songs are distinctly hers. And with her cool-headed outsidery appraisal of so many North American traditions, she's distinctly Canadian as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE CRAZY CRIES OF LOVE")
MITCHELL: (Singing) They were laughing. They were dancing in the rain. They knew their love was a strong one. When they heard the far-off whistle of a train, they were hoping it was going to be a long one 'cause oh, oh, my, my when that train comes rolling by no paper-thin walls, no folks above, no one else can hear the crazy cries of love.
MOSLEY: Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reviewed "Joni's Jazz" by Joni Mitchell.
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, some remarkable things about your body and ways some malfunctioning body parts can be replaced. We talk with Mary Roach. Her new book, "Replaceable You," is about research into transplanting organs, why a pig organ donor is better than a goat, regenerating cells, prosthetic legs and feet and more. I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF MILES DAVIS' "FREDDIE FREELOADER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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