Traveling by Ann Powers

Author:Ann Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

A WOMAN’S SENSE OF TIME

For me, a story from Joni’s early years illuminates the deepest purpose of her jazz fusion experiments. She was dating Leonard Cohen and trying to become a better artist in every way. Frustrated with her attempts at sketching—“It’s too naive and too ornate,” she said—she sought the advice of Cohen’s best friend, the sculptor Morton Rosengarten. “Let’s go to Washington Square Park,” the sculptor said. Once there, he sat on a bench and said, “Joni, draw me and don’t look at the paper.”

She did, and subtly, suddenly, everything changed for her. No longer focusing on her own quivering hand, she felt free of her ego. Later she told Malka Marom that this was the moment that made her work “more realistic and more immediate and more modern”—not only her drawings and paintings, but her music. She started experimenting with song structures even then, “more rhythmic, less classical, more rocky jazz.” Her kind of fusion. In music, drawing without looking at the paper meant creating something that would get her out of her head and make her want to dance.

Rock and roll rhythms, extending into funk, fed many fusion experiments. Purists hated that aspect of the music, saying rock’s simplicity squashed everything else fusion players wove into their mix. It’s true that an insistent beat could overshadow the other elements in the music. The newly minted jazz fans laying out cash for a Weather Report show might not have recognized the cumbia or son rhythms invoked, but their asses moved when they felt the influence of Jimi Hendrix or James Brown.

For Mitchell and her singer-songwriter crowd, though—mostly white kids who loved Chuck Berry before they’d ever heard of Woody Guthrie—turning back toward the rock and roll of their teen years necessarily loosened things up. Many did smell the money that nostalgia always generates, and kept things simple with cover versions or rewrites of the jukebox songs of their childhood. James Taylor and Carly Simon redid Inez and Charlie Foxx’s hopped-up soul stirrer “Mockingbird”; Linda Ronstadt covered the Motown-ish Dee Dee Warwick jumper “You’re No Good.” Others mimicked 1950s jukebox hits to craft their own: Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Crocodile Rock” openly borrowed from the Australian band Daddy Cool’s 1971 raver “Eagle Rock,” which itself owed everything to Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” The money rolled in for these artists, whose fans were ready to return to times before the 1970s wrecked their roll, as Joni saw it, and have some fun again.

Why do the songs from Mitchell’s fusion period so rarely feel like throwbacks, then, unlike the American Graffiti reduxes other white singer-songwriters created? Partly it’s because, as with her open tunings, when it came to rhythmic composition she gave herself permission to consistently veer from the norm. She’d start writing something in 4/4 time but then throw in a section in 5/8 or 4/8—aiming, as she said, for something “sideways.” Guerin invented a system of transcription to guide the band, a way of mapping her hip shakes, so the jazz guys confronted with her eccentricities could get into her groove.

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