What happened when Joni Mitchell made Blue? Accounts abound of the recording sessions at the studio owned by A&M Records on North LaBrea Avenue in Hollywood in January 1971, and of the months before, when Mitchell started sharing the songs she’d lay down in that room, saying, hey, listen to this in the hours after the canyon parties wound down; and of the time before that, when she wandered from Greek hippie communes to Paris hotel rooms collecting the sex and laughs and loneliness from which the songs would come.
That’s its rare quality, also immanent in the brush strokes of the Japanese shan shui master Sesshu and the voice of Billie Holiday: Their makers’ mark is inscribed so delicately in these works, yet so unmistakably, that they feel immortal in a unique way.
Sometimes, certainly, it was Joni alone, trying out a new way to hit a low note, or to sing the word “California.” This is what people mean when they call Blue “personal.” More than most pop albums made in its era of recording-studio innovation, it’s very obviously made by people, note by note.
Over time, enough people put enough pins in the same spot and the music that means so many different things to different people gains an official story.
I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong.
Zadie Smith, writing an essay to help her understand why, though she mostly only loved soul music, Blue got to her, made this point as well as anybody: “I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or on an iPod, walking the streets.
Hell, she’d used the line “I felt like cellophane” as part of her in-concert banter even earlier, in 1974, explaining a completely different kind of song from a completely different album — the acerbic “People’s Parties” from the poppy Court and Spark.
If you’ve ever tried, you know the best part is that seeming magic when, for a moment, what is on the inside of your brain overcomes the barrier of your hesitation and actually emerges on the page or the canvas, almost whole.
I think that work started years before Mitchell wrote the songs that would become the album, back when she first heard Miles Davis play his horn.
Mercer writes, “Joni also resents being reduced to a musical memoirist because it puts the art behind the feeling, when in her work feeling is a construct of art.” And then she quotes Mitchell on the title track of Blue: “I think the first few notes on ‘Blue’ sound like a muted trumpet tone.
What if Blue were framed not as a direct outpouring of emotion but as a response to another artist’s careful distillation of similar impulses and moods? As not only the apex of Joni Mitchell’s confessional period, but also the beginning of her jazz phase? “On Blue,” Mercer writes, “Mitchell began to integrate the music she loved into the music she made.” Mitchell is never one to go for the obvious connection, and if anyone asked her, she’d probably say no, I prefer Miles’s Sketches of Spain.
Its members spanned the range of jazz expressiveness: earthy pleasure, in the horn of Cannonball Adderley; austere introversion, from the fingers of pianist Bill Evans; edgy experimentalism, in the cascades of notes let forth by tenor sax player John Coltrane.
Miles was an idiom unto himself.” Not unlike Joni, who became an idiom — the singer-songwriter mode, embodied — after releasing the album whose cover resembled those famous jazz sleeves a boy had placed in her arms one high school afternoon back in Saskatoon.
Kind of Blue announced what it would accomplish — something Davis had been headed toward for a while — from the first two dozen bars of its first track, “So What,” which only used two chords.
Ashley Kahn, who wrote a book on the album, says the approaches of Davis and Evans, his main compositional collaborator in the sessions, were “all about pruning away excess and distilling emotion.” Giddins describes it as a revolutionary blend of experimentation and accessibility — Zen or James Joyce, but for everyone.
When I spoke to him about the Blue sessions, James Taylor, who played on three songs on the album, made an interesting analogy.
He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment.
Though she brought raw feelings into the room, the fundamental challenge this music made to rock and folk norms required her and her few collaborators to be deeply mindful, to play with care and continually surprise themselves.
On the dulcimer, Mitchell learned a “slap technique” from its maker, Joellen Lapidus: She would strum and dampen the strings almost at the same time, to create an effect that evoked a drum.
“For me it was heaven sent,” he said of the dulcimer.
Joni Mitchell and James Taylor singing at A&M Records Recording Studio, during the recording sessions that produced Carole King’s 1971 album Tapestry.
Most analyses of/paeans to/reflections about Blue mention that Mitchell and James Taylor were leading intertwined lives when she made it, and that this relationship occurred after some rambling on her part, which itself followed the dissolution of her more serious love match with Graham Nash.
Always bringing problems. The whole cellophane thing — the vulnerability, the raw electric nerve connecting Joni’s soul to those songs — is supposedly rooted in all this romantic trauma, along with the pressures of new stardom and the after-effects of one bad acid trip.
Technicians heard strains of her soft guitar music when the wind was blowing toward them.” Like probably every interviewer before me, I asked Taylor about that vest, transformed into a sweater in the first verse of the first song on Blue, “All I Want.” He turned the familiar question into a chance to praise his long-ago lover’s ingenuity.
According to the gossip that would become historical record, Taylor in his 20s was one of those icy-hot guys, like Miles, in fact, who always needed to make sure that he could get another woman if need be; like Bill Evans, he was also an off-again, mostly on-again junkie.
When Bill Evans wrote “Peace Piece,” which became the launching point for Kind of Blue’s final track, “Flamenco Sketches,” he was spiraling into a drug dependency that would grip him for the rest of his life.
Mitchell herself has said that she bled these songs onto the pages, and that’s what everyone has chosen to remember.
Though he wasn’t devoted to open tunings the way Mitchell was, he’d developed a fingerpicking style that allowed him to sustain notes and smoothly move from chord to chord, a technique he inspired by what he’d learned on the instruments he learned as a child, the cello and the piano.
That Mitchell was involved with Taylor at the time of Blue makes a difference, but not because of their kisses or their fights or their mutual cruelty.
The most famous description of Kind of Blue came from the English critic Kenneth Tynan’s nine-year-old daughter.
Denied nearly any guidance from their leader — no charts, no rehearsals — Davis’s band members each found themselves on the outside of their own preconceptions and used whatever ingenuity and strengths they could muster to get back in.
The lyrics were not improvised, but as in a great jazz run, they expose the erratic essence of emotional experience and honor the heroism inherent in the simple human act of making sense of oneself.
There’s “A Case of You” for her long-gone older lover, Leonard Cohen, but also for James, a song about stamina: “I could drink a case of you, darlin’,” she brags, trumpeting a ridiculous high note, “and still be on my feet.” There’s “Little Green,” for the daughter she lost at the point of adoption, Kelly Dale, such an obvious confession and no one got it at the time.
Juliette Greco, Miles Davis’s lover during an idyll he spent in Europe as a young man, described him this way: “There was such an unusual harmony between the man, the instrument and the sound — it was pretty shattering.” Blue is Mitchell exploring the same harmony, between her psyche, her voice and her songs.
Fifty years on, can we see Joni Mitchell’s downcast eyes on the cover of Blue, her turn inward, as a sign not merely of sorrow, but of self-possession? With Blue, Mitchell fully realized her authority; she rewrote the stories of her own life, not only in words, but by finding music that would make each word sound differently.