Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell is a person.
- See: Folk Music, Rock Music, Jazz.
References
2016
- (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joni_Mitchell Retrieved:2016-12-17.
- Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell, CC (née Anderson ; born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer and painter. Rolling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever", and AllMusic has stated, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century". Drawing from folk, pop, rock and jazz, Mitchell's songs often reflect social and environmental ideals as well as her feelings about romance, confusion, disillusionment and joy. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatchewan and western Canada before busking in the streets and shoddy nightclubs of Toronto. In 1965, she moved to the United States and began touring. Some of her original songs ("Urge for Going", “Chelsea Morning", “Both Sides, Now", "The Circle Game") were covered by folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her debut album in 1968. Settling in Southern California, Mitchell, with popular songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock", helped define an era and a generation. Her 1971 recording Blue was rated the 30th best album ever made in Rolling Stone's list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”. Mitchell switched labels and began moving toward jazz rhythms by way of lush pop textures on 1974's Court and Spark, her best-selling LP, featuring the radio hits “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris”. [1] Her wide-ranging contralto vocals and distinctive open-tuned guitar and piano compositions grew more harmonically and rhythmically complex as she explored jazz, melding it with influences of rock and roll, R&B, classical music, and non-western beats. In the late 1970s, she began working closely with noted jazz musicians, among them Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, and Charles Mingus, who asked her to collaborate on his final recordings. She turned again toward pop, embraced electronic music, and engaged in political protest. She is the sole producer credited on most of her albums, including all her work in the 1970s. A blunt critic of the music industry, she quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in 2007. With roots in visual art, Mitchell designed her own album covers. She describes herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".
- ↑ [Ankeny, Jason. All Music Guide]
2013
- Zadie Smith. (2013). “Some Notes on Attunement - A voyage around Joni Mitchell." The New Yorker
- QUOTE: … Perhaps this is only a story about philistinism. A quality always easier to note in other people than to detect in yourself. Aged twenty, I listened to Joni Mitchell — a singer whom millions enjoy, who does not, after all, make an especially unusual or esoteric sound — and found her incomprehensible. Could not even really recognize her piping as “singing.” It was just noise. And, without troubling over it much, I placed her piping alongside all the interesting noises we hear in the world but choose, through habit or policy, to separate from music. What can you call that but philistinism? You don’t like Joni? My friends had pity in their eyes. The same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces. …
… And then what? As I remember it, sun flooded the area; my husband quoted a line from one of the Lucy poems; I began humming a strange piece of music. Something had happened to me. In all the mess of memories we make each day and lose, I knew that this one would not be lost. I had Wordsworth’s sensation exactly: “That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” Or thought I had it. Digging up the poem now, I see that I am, in some ways, telling the opposite story. What struck the author of “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) was a memory of ecstasy: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzy raptures.” … It’s striking to me that this past self should at all times be loved and appreciated by Wordsworth. He understands that the callow youth was the basis of the greater man he would become. A natural progression: between the boy Wordsworth and the man, between then and now. His mind is not so much changed as deepened. …
… I should confess at this point that when I’m thinking of Joni Mitchell it’s “Blue” I’m thinking of, really. … the album pretty much every fool owns, no matter how far from music his life has taken him. And it’s not even really the content of the music that interests me here. It’s the transformation of the listening.
- QUOTE: … Perhaps this is only a story about philistinism. A quality always easier to note in other people than to detect in yourself. Aged twenty, I listened to Joni Mitchell — a singer whom millions enjoy, who does not, after all, make an especially unusual or esoteric sound — and found her incomprehensible. Could not even really recognize her piping as “singing.” It was just noise. And, without troubling over it much, I placed her piping alongside all the interesting noises we hear in the world but choose, through habit or policy, to separate from music. What can you call that but philistinism? You don’t like Joni? My friends had pity in their eyes. The same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces. …