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Dave Gould

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Joni Mitchell's Long and Restless Journey

January 5, 2003
By JOHN ROCKWELL

JONI MITCHELL'S new "Travelogue" isn't billed as a
farewell, but it's hard to see it any other way. Ms.
Mitchell is 58, and her once-girlish soprano is now a frail
and unsteady mezzo. This personally (not to say
idiosyncratically) chosen, newly arranged collection of 22
of her songs from 1966 to 1994 presumably represents some
sort of retrospective summa.

Of course, it's always dangerous to presume anyone's
motivations, let alone those of an artist as hermetically
private as Ms. Mitchell. But in addition to this quasi
memorial to herself (Nonesuch, two CD's), she has chosen to
blast the music industry in a recent interview in Rolling
Stone, denouncing the business as a cesspool and MTV's
vulgarity, as she sees it, as "tragic." Having now fled her
longtime base of Reprise, she didn't flee too far, however,
since Nonesuch is also part of AOL Time Warner.

As a longtime admirer of Ms. Mitchell - I even lived in her
Laurel Canyon neighborhood in the early 70's - I must
confess that my first reaction to this new set was one of
horror. Asked recently by WNYC-FM to appear on air with
some emblematic examples of American music in the 20th
century, I thought of her song "Amelia," which was once my
prime evidence when I called her a 20th-century American
Schubert.

The song appears on Ms. Mitchell's 1976 album "Hejira,"
which is full of songs about flight and wandering and
loneliness. "Amelia" is Amelia Earhart, the doomed
aviatrix. Ms. Mitchell's words tie together place and heart
and mind, myth and history, womanhood and a lost love. She
starts by evoking the emptiness of the desert and the sky,
six jet vapor trails "like the hexagram of the heavens,
like the strings of my guitar." Her "life becomes a
travelogue" - you see how central this one song is to this
new retrospective travelogue of her life in song.

Suddenly she's missing a lover. She equates herself with
Amelia and with Icarus, "ascending on beautiful foolish
arms."

"I've spent my whole life at icy altitudes," she muses.
"And looking down on everything/ I crashed into his arms."

Finally she pulls in to a desert motel, showers and sleeps
"on the strange pillows of my wanderlust," dreaming "of
747's/ Over geometric farms."

On the original studio recording, the accompaniment is
electric guitars and vibraphones, electronically sustaining
Ms. Mitchell's own inimitable vocals, cool and clipped, and
almost pushing this sad, intimate, conversational song
along to its conclusion. Even better, really, is the live
version on her album "Shadows and Light" of 1980, just as
nervously forward-moving but with a guitar backing closer
to her folkish roots.

The new version, indeed the entire album, comes dressed
(overdressed) in orchestral /soft-jazz arrangements by
Larry Klein. Mr. Klein and Ms. Mitchell were married for
eight years, and although they broke up domestically in
1994, they have continued to collaborate professionally,
having now completed nine projects together.

Having heard "Amelia" in its new guise, I think I called it
an abomination on the radio. Now I've listened to the whole
album. One must make allowances for an artist's right to
evolve and for fans' right to cling, even unfairly, to what
they once loved. And one must concede a certain winsome
communicativeness in Ms. Mitchell's vocal weaknesses. But I
still think this set is pretty terrible.

Part of the problem is simple taste. I personally have
little use for the kind of bloated symphonic jazz heard
here. Ms. Mitchell clearly does have a taste for it, so
much so that she now chops up the urgent flow of "Amelia"
for soggy orchestral ditherings between the verses.

Any artist must constantly question his or her past
accomplishments; to repeat oneself risks becoming a hack.
In fairness, Ms. Mitchell has undertaken a hejira of her
own over some 23 albums (depending on how you count). From
folk to folk rock to jazz (or jazz folk), all with her own
highly personal inventiveness, and now to this, it's been a
trip that has alienated fans along the way, throwing them
off the curves, as it were. But the journey has presumably
helped keep her fresh.

That said, restless experimentation also suggests a quality
of unwelcome self-indulgence that has always marked her
music and her personality. When one confronts the really
naove paintings that proliferate in the lavish booklet with
which these two CD's are packaged - let alone the
rudimentary "multi-media content" on the one "enhanced
audio CD" - one has to wonder whether Ms. Mitchell has slid
too far into her own world. There is usually some kind of
healthy link between creator and public, or at least
imagined public, a link that sustains even the most private
artists and helps dampen the temptation toward vanity
projects like "Travelogue."

Her early jazz experiments could be welcomed as the
honorable efforts of a folk-rock singer to connect with the
wider world of improvisation in jazz. One fears that this
album marks some sort of aspiration to "art" in the
classical, formalized sense. Nonesuch is, after all, AOL
Time Warner's prestige label, especially for classical
music and crossover projects of a certain vanguard sort.
But a self-conscious aspiration for gentility can kill the
essence of the idioms that Ms. Mitchell grew up with.

Above, I called her singing inimitable. But of course it
isn't, quite. Right now, the best live Joni Mitchell is the
countertenor-falsettist-drag artist John Kelly in his
periodic revivals of his Joni Mitchell act, fabled in
downtown Manhattan. Mr. Kelly sings Ms. Mitchell far better
than she sings herself now. If you want her unadulterated,
buy albums like "Ladies of the Canyon," "Blue," "Court and
Spark" or "Hejira." If you want to see her in person, catch
John Kelly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/arts/music/05ROCK.html?ex=1042777812&ei=1&en=b93d8bcebd0f6a5e

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