Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

Yes. In a way this breaks all the other rules of all my other choices [laughs]. It's incredibly complex. I remember buying this album when it came out in 1974 because I know it had a big impact on what I was working on at the time, which was Another Green World. When I heard this record I really thought that I've got to change what I'm doing. But the change was actually to do with recording practices as much as anything else. It is the best engineered album you've ever heard. The engineer Henry Lewy was obviously one of those great engineers like John Wood who just really understood sound and really understood how you could have that frequency there but not that one so you just shave that little bit of frequency off and you leave room for another one. These alchemists of sound. I'm sure he would have been working in the same studio for a long time and knew exactly how it worked and how it sounded. It was a set of circumstances that all came together correctly, her amazing songwriting talent and that gentleness of that Canadian feeling, rather than that American feeling, so there's restraint and slight self-effacement about it, a modesty about it. Then when you mix it with all these super flash session players, it makes it even more modest.

I wish the outro to help me would just keep going, it's a wonderful shift

xp dropping some knowledge right there!

what interview is that from? I never read that before - I was referencing the long Lester Bangs article that was published way after the fact through PSF: http://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno.html

"had he heard the new Joni Mitchell album of songs co-written with Charlie Mingus? "No, I bought it but immediately gave it away. I'd like to record with Joni Mitchell. I like her in that one period: Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark. Since then, I don't know--Weather Report strike me as all people who are continually promising with no delivery.""

damn that letterman video! she is such a master

great eno quotes on C&S

I can't really fault that opinion, xp. Weather Report is ridiculously uneven and that Joni Mingus album is, idk, I hate to say "bad" but it's not the most enjoyable listening.

yea it's not that great. the interludes are annoying too

don juan on the hand is a great record

*other

hmm I've tried. I like the title track and a couple others

Aethetically Joni is a really odd pairing with Mingus's music, they're worlds apart.

I actually think Mingus is heavily underrated-- the two Joni originals (Boogie Man, Wolf That Lives In Lindsay) are all-time-- and the Mingus collaboration idea, like, the way she decided to go about it, is such a challenging proposition that it's amazing that the results work at all? And I hate to admit it but Dry Cleaner is one of my childhood faves and I prob still know all the words

yeah, I owe Misses for introducing me to "Wolf That Lives In Lindsay" -- the guitar, god.

Was never that much of a Jaco fan, though some of the tracks incl. him work, but wonder what would have happened if she'd worked with Zawinul and Shorter, the WR core (JP was one of several passing Weather Reporters). Thinking of Shorter's solo on "Aja, " for instance, and Zawinul wrote the sturdy "Mercy Mercy Mercy," which got more radio play for Cannonball Adderly, and much more for the Buckinghams. Since the point of her playing with other musos was to get on the radio, I take it----and if it was also about creative recharging, like the Mingus project, then the duo could be good for that too (even if they talked her into recording the notorious "Birdland," mighta kinda worked---)
Speaking as I did way upthread of my 60s take on her as a kind of one-woman Pentangle (with her own agenda lyrics-wise), would *most* like to have heard her with Pentangle bassist & drummer, Danny Thompson & Terry Cox. But some of her bands were pretty good.

I thought I read she started playing with jazz dudes because nobody else could play her songs well enough or correctly or something

Mingus maybe took me a few plays before I loved it, though I no longer remember what it felt like to not love it

She's talked about it a few times over the years, and I think it's utterly fascinating, but Joni (perhaps instinctively) started gravitating toward using lots of suspended chords after Blue. Wayne Shorter pointed it out at first, that she was going from suspended chord to suspended chord, which wasn't typically "done"-- she herself had been calling those chords "chords of inquiry"

https://books.google.ca/books?id=eZegBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT128&lpg=PT128&dq=joni+mitchell+suspended+chords&source=bl&ots=zeA_YDnhfU&sig=-qj77TGFIl2rOzMbaxxqB2U9pwc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi80a2czIXaAhUB8mMKHX7FAPAQ6AEISzAE#v=onepage&q=joni%20mitchell%20suspended%20chords&f=false

She would later begin to associate this compositional choice with femininity, describing suspended chords as inherently feminine. From a 2014 interview in MacLean's:

Q: Laws you felt needed to be broken. For example, your use of suspended chords in songs—which you say men cannot wrap their heads around. Why?

A: Men need resolution and suspended chords keep things open-ended. You go to a man if you have a problem and he tries to solve it. You go to a girlfriend and she’ll pat you on the back and say, “Oh yeah, I get it.” She doesn’t try and come up with some stupid solution.

, but wonder what would have happened if she'd worked with Zawinul and Shorter, the WR core

she worked with shorter some, didn't she? he's on mingus, and i think they toured together a little, too.

whoa, that bit about suspended chords is fascinating, and I have to admit that I have had trouble "wrapping my head around" her compositional style, like I don't think I could imitate it, and it took me a long time to get used to it although now I love it so much.

xpost had totally forgotten Shorter's on Mingus, and never knew they played live, will look for that. Thanks!
Reminds me: this guy's got some good shows (inc. the often-designated-as-1966 Second Fret set, which might be/seems like prob. is '67, based on points made by some fans), also demos for Summer Lawns (these are the mp3s, but he has 'em in flacs too):
http://www.ousterhout.net/mp3/jm.html
Tons of other (gen. Joni-compatible) stuff too.

it took me 20+ years to internalize Joni's love of suspensions. it was worth it

there's definitely interesting stuff about shorter in the [wait for it i'm about to plug it again] yaffa biog

the unresolved suspensions also give a lot of the songs a sense of shifting or uncertain tonality, so it's sort of doubly ambiguous.

I really love discussions of the obscure feelings evoked by certain chords and cadences. My dream is that some day a music writer will reveal to me the secrets behind the rollercoaster of ambiguous emotions that is the Steely Dan "Glamor Profession" chord progression.

haha, I have actually thought about that before too, there's definitely a very particular mood evoked by that song, upbeat in a drug-induced way and slightly demented

every time i read about her use of suspended chords i think "oh yeah, of course, that's why so many joni records are bottomless"

"chords of inquiry" is the perfect name too i think bc they just sound like big question marks curving through the mix

OTM about Glamour Profession, particularly the descending chords under the first line of the chorus.

To me, it's like each chord change has this little emotional up or down that I can feel but can't quite name. It's very cinematic, music as montage.

I always think about how in Janie Runaway the chord that holds on the verse sounds very "almost ok," like a guy just trying to seem chill and normal and not at all perverted, but then he starts to have trouble containing his perverse excitement when the chord changes on "Who makes the traffic interesting"

Re: "Glamor Profession"-- I've never listened to it before, but I just listened to it now

If I were to guess, I think Mr. Dan is taking the piss, deliberately creating the most obfuscation-per-chord-move as possible. Right off the top, he's suspending a G over three different possibilities for "chords that contain a G"-- this was taught to me as being called a "mediant movement"? "common tone"? but who the fuck knows-- the idea is that a G is sustained through the first chord (am7) and the second chord (g-half-diminished-7 1st inv.) and the third chord (cm)-- note that the bass is rather hilariously ascending stepwise to make this really uncomfortable collection of chords go down easier-- this is the way that Brecht writes chord progressions.

Immediately I'm reminded of a similar "lol let's string together a tonne of ridiculously unrelated-or-only-somewhat-related chords and try and write a hook over top of it" and it's Blur's "Coffee And TV"-- maybe the "ambiguous emotions" Moodles is feeling are also felt in that song?

There's a lot of augmented chords here, there's a full on whole-tone slide down with them, lots of diminished chords and "let's just move this chord down a semitone ha ha ha" moves. idk there's nothing really going on here but "extreme chromaticism". Sounds like Brecht over a backbeat-- although Brecht is clevererer, he throws in some basic-bitch diatonic passages to soothe the ear once in a while, to make the bizarro moves really "count"

Pardonnez-moi I smoked weed and had "On Suicide" in my head and was typing "Brecht" but I meant "Weill" Jesus Christ how embarrassing

Sometimes I think Steely Dan sounds like music by dudes who learned all the jazz chords but none of the jazz chord progressions. In a good way.

i think they've themselves said they were rock/r&b but with 'subversive' jazz chords or something

They took me a while too, especially coming to them as a jazz guy and hearing they were "heavily jazz influenced" or something and then listening to them I was like "Huh, these guys sound like they've never heard jazz and just had it described to them."

Great points FGTI! I think it's all the augmented chords that give it this constant low-budget horror film monster reveal vibe, or perhaps it's soap opera shocking news.

I really love discussions of the obscure feelings evoked by certain chords and cadences. My dream is that some day a music writer will reveal to me the secrets behind the rollercoaster of ambiguous emotions that is the Steely Dan "Glamor Profession" chord progression.

I am a forever dilettante on this front but Glamour Profession is about the modulations right? there are a bunch of them, but they're not super-woozy, just enough to force you to adjust between verse & BR1 & BR2 & chorus

Jack and his radar
stalking the dread moray eel

I drove the Chrysler
Watched from the darkness while they danced

"these guys sound like they've never heard jazz and just had it described to them."

would probably check out a new band described this way

Sounds like a description of King Krule

accurate

Stevie, regarding that Yaffe biog, does it go into detail about the Morgellons disease?

Not huge detail, but there is some stuff on it

ok

is it... disconcerting?

It should be.

I’m most interested in the weird period after Hejira, eg Don Juan.

I love the way she sings “false alarm” in Amelia. Had that bit stuck in my head for days now.

me too!

more excited than I should be about Hejira coming in the post today. one of those records i've been meaning to buy for avout 20 years