Should We Think of Joni Mitchell as a Jazz Singer? A New Box Says Yes

Thanks to A Complete Unknown and the forthcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, the concept of musicians intentionally throwing their audiences for a loop is back in the national conversation. But as Joni Mitchell would be the first to tell you, no one made a fan base engage in more collective head-scratching and exasperation than she did nearly 50 years ago.

Recruiting serious jazz players instead of the usual.A. studio cats, Mitchell spent several years discarding the daily-journal lyric writing and folkish melodies of her early work and wandering into more musically lyrically abstract territory on albums like Mingus and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. As she told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone in 1979, “It’s just that at a certain point, my poetry began to spill out of the form and into something more relative to a jazz sense of melody, which was restating the melody in variation.”

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At an equally certain point, her fans and many of her critic champions bailed, at least for many years. (Suddenly, it was her fans who were blue.) In retrospect, a sprawling album like Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter has held up better than anyone might have thought in a year when L.A. rock was embodied by Hotel California and Running on Empty. But right up through her take on “Summertime” from her startling 2023 comeback at the Newport Folk Festival, Mitchell’s love of jazz has never wavered. And the extent to which she wants it known that the music is as much a part of her DNA as singer-songwriter balladry — whether you, the listener, approve or not — clearly drives Joni’s Jazz, the latest installment in her series of retrospective box sets.

On the fourth volume of her Joni Mitchell Archives set last year, Mitchell explored the period from the making of Hejira up through the Shadows and Light live album cut with players like Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny. Joni’s Jazz picks up that theme and runs with it. Spanning decades, albums, and cohorts, the set attempts to make the case that Mitchell’s jazz period wasn’t a fluke, that she was, in fact, a jazz singer of sorts all along.

More often than not, she wasn’t wrong. Alone along her peers, Mitchell was blessed with a limber soprano that could navigate vocalese, jazz melodies, and less predictable rhythms with a fluid ease, as a return visit to “Blue Hotel Room” from Hejira reminds you. Her version of “You’re My Thrill” (from 2000’s covers-heavy Both Sides Now) uncannily conjures Billie Holiday’s original, and she and her collaborators wove horn arrangements into her work in a far more sophisticated and subtle way than what we encountered on jazz-rock albums of the Seventies. During an era when some of her troubadour friends were steering toward yacht rock, “You Dream Flat Tires,” from 1982’s uneven Wild Things Run Fast, now sounds even more like a brave attempt at fusion. A demo of “Two Grey Rooms,” one of the sadly few previously unreleased tracks here, substitutes a wordless vocal for the lyrics of the finished version on Night Ride Home. It’s not just a vocal showcase for her but actually more alluring in this form.

But in a sign that Mitchell is perhaps still sensitive to the criticism that she wandered too far afield, Joni’s Jazz can feel like a jazz improv that goes on a bit too long. Spread out over four CDs or eight LPs, the 61-track box feels at least one batch of songs too long. To reinforce the notion that she was thinking and sounding like a jazz singer from day one, Mitchell has dipped into her catalog for examples that prove her point (“Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” from For the Roses) and some that really don’t (“The Jungle Line” from Don Juan). On a version of “The Man I Love,” cut a while back with Herbie Hancock, Mitchell truly came into her own as a standards singer. But fans of her own writing will be tested by the inclusion of a few too many of those covers. In its determination to make its point, Joni’s Jazz is a labor of love that still feels a little labored.

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