I don't know whether this has been posted before. It is the Joni Mitchell entry from the captioned organ. Pretty honest entry. It was obviously added quite soon after TI
Quote: Mitchell, Joni [Anderson, Roberta Joan] (b Macleod [now Fort Macleod], AB, 7 Nov 1943). Canadian singer-songwriter. After a childhood in Canada and brief study at art college in Calgary in 1963, she moved via Toronto and Detroit to New York, where she recorded her first album at the age of 25. Largely using voice and acoustic guitar alone, her first two albums, Joni Mitchell (Song to a Seagull) (Reprise, 1968) and Clouds (Reprise, 1969), are characterized by the then-current folk style (modal harmony and mystic lyrics). Her own mature style was established by the early 1970s and demonstrates a visual imagination, a precise sense of place and landscape, and an ability to attain a deep and personal lyric. The album Blue (Reprise, 1971) illustrates her instrumental prowess, harmonic surety and profound lyric sense. Her voice, best heard on ?A Case of You?, is especially notable for its variety, from a rich lower register to a remarkable upper range. >From Court and Spark (Asylum, 1974) to Mingus (Asylum, 1979) Mitchell combined a rhythmically liberating and freer use of voice with an exploration of jazz harmony, which reached its peak on Hejira (Asylum, 1976). By this point it was evident that Mitchell was under-represented in American rock journalism in relation to her output and critical rating. A change of label accompanied her into the 1980s, and her sound followed the 1980s shift into drum technology and a sense of production: her dialogues with Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone provide the best examples from this period. She has continued to address urgent political themes, maintained lyrical depth and also taken on settings of Yeats, as in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1991), and the Book of Job in The Sire of Sorrow (1994). As a Canadian singer-songwriter emerging during the 1960s she introduced singular and important insistences: to the deep relation of lyric to landscape and the pictorial, to questions concerning personal freedom and responsibility from a female perspective. She has also taken an innovative approach, particularly in relating the potential for musical advance in song with the improvisatory basis of jazz. In range she is one of the few singer-songwriters to have matched Dylan; nevertheless her albums of the 1980s are marred by the intrusiveness of production, a problem for much popular music at the time. Her more recent album Turbulent Indigo (Reprise, 1994) returns to earlier points of reference with an older and darker voice. BIBLIOGRAPHY L. Fleischer: Joni Mitchell: her Lives, her Loves, her Music (London, 1976) W. Mellers: ?White Seagull, Black Highwaywoman, Red Squaw: Joni Mitchell?, Angels of the Night: Popular Female Singers of Our Time (Oxford, 1986), 141?68 B. Hinton: Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now (London, 1996) Unquote. ~Kevin
