Next at the Kennedy Center: "A Joni Mitchell Songbook" (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, PBS, filmed May 25 and 26, 2022; aired November 22, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched a couple of quite interesting music-related shows on PBS. The first was an hour-long entry in a series called Next at the Kennedy Center, which looks like an attempt by the PBS station in Washington, D.C. to do a show to compete with the long-running New York show Live from Lincoln Center. This episode was called “A Joni Mitchell Songbook” and had its roots not only in Joni Mitchell’s music generally but specifically in two albums she made about 20 years ago, Both Sides Now and Travelogue, in which she performed several of her old songs backed by a 50-piece symphony orchestra under the direction of Vince Mendoza. This telecast was filmed May 25 and 26, 2022, and at the time COVID-19 was enough of a live issue that many of the musicians – particularly the string players, who unlike the reed and brass players don’t have to blow into their instruments to get them to sound – were wearing face masks. The concerts featured other singers doing Joni Mitchell’s songs with the arrangements Mendoza originally wrote for Mitchell herself, and instead of grabbing major “names” from today’s pop music world Mendoza went for more obscure talents, or at least people I’d never heard of before: Aoife O’Donovan (given that name I assumed she was Irish; she was actually born in Massachusetts, though she spent summers in Ireland as a girl and learned traditional Irish music at the source), Jimmie Herrod (a young Black man with a naturally high voice who reminded me a bit of the frustratingly under-recorded Black jazz singer Jimmie Scott), Raul Midón, Lelah Hathaway (a heavy-set Black woman who I thought was the strongest singer on the program) and the one singer I had heard of before, opera star Renée Fleming.

I’ve never been that big a fan of Joni Mitchell – she’s always been one of those artists I’ve admired much more often than I’ve actually loved – and quite frankly my favorite Joni Mitchell records were her albums from the 1970’s, beginning with Court and Spark (1973) and on through her remarkable Mingus (1979). The latter began as a collaboration between Mitchell and jazz great Charles Mingus, and they wrote three songs together befo0re Mingus’s ALS disability became too great for him to continue on the project. So she completed the album herself, writing lyrics to Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” (a tribute to Lester Young written after Young’s death in 1959) and adding two more songs of her own, including one about Mingus called “God Must Be a Boogie Man.” Though I was disappointed in one aspect of the album – her decision to use an electric bassist, Jaco Pastorious, instead of an acoustic bass player as Mingus had been – otherwise Mingus was a brilliant album and a surprise from someone I’d previously written off as just another folkie. (Besides creating the music, Mitchell also painted the hauntingly beautiful cover art.) Last night’s program contained eight songs – I presume trhe actual concerts were longer – and it began with Aoife O’Donovan’s slow, beautifully phrased version of Mitchell’s song “Woodstock.” I still have major problems with the mythologizing of Woodstock – unlike a lot of other people, I was alive (though on the other end of the country) when it happened and I remember the initial coverage as a muddy disaster before the myth-making took over (I’ve extensively discussed the Woodstock myth before on moviemagg, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/08/by-time-we-got-to-woodstock.html, and I notice I even used the famous catch phrase from Mitchell’s song, “By the time we got to Woodstock … ,” as my title) and bailed out the capitalist entrepreneurs who had launched the festival in the first place.

The next song after O’Donovan’s haunting “Woodstock” was “A Case of You” sung by the high-voiced Black male Jimmie Herrod. Then Renée Fleming came on for “The Circle Game,” which she said was written by Mitchell to reassure her good friend Neil Young that he still had a life and a career left even though he was about to turn 20 years old. (It’s indicative of the youth cult of the 1960’s that a prodigiously talented musician like Neil Young would worry about burning out at 20, especially since he’s still alive and has had a quite remarkable and exploratory career.) Alas, Fleming’s version was just too slow and missed the spirit of Mitchell’s original. Fortunately, the next singer was Raul Madón doing an infectious version of one of Mitchell’s jazziest tunes, “Be Cool” (even the title is an iconic sentiment in the jazz world!). Then Madón joined forces with Lelah Hathaway for “Sex Kills,” arguably the closest Joni Mitchell has ever come to writing a punk-rock song. Jimmie Herrod seemed to get lost in the convoluted lyrics of Mitchell’s “Hejira,” but fortunately Aoife O’Donovan redeemed things with her interpretation of “River.” There was an interstitial clip of jazz pianist Herbie Hancock reminiscing about recording “River” with Wayne Shorter on sax as part of his 2097 album River: The Joni Letters, which won him a Grammy award for Album of the Year (the first time a jazz album had won since the 1964 release Getz/Gilberto, a classic fusion of jazz and Brazilian bossa nova music). River: The Joni Letters alternated instrumental tracks and vocals by guest artists; “River” was sung by Corinne Bailey Rae (she and O’Donovan do it equally well). and other guest singers included Norah Jones,Tina Turner (surprisingly restrained on “Edith and the Kingpin”), Luciana Souza, Leonard Cohen (doing a rap version of “The Jungle Line”), Sonya Kitchell, and on one song, “Tea Leaf Prophecy,” Joni Mitchell herself.

After “River” the Kennedy Center concert (or at least the TV version) concluded with Lelah Hathaway doing what is probably Mitchell’s best-known song, “Both Sides Now.” The song was a hit for Judy Collins in 1968 and Mitchell’s first version (on her second album, Clouds) seemed oddly bored, as if she were thinking, “Well, people know I wrote this song and they’re going to want to hear me sing it, but I really don’t want to.” But she did choose it as the title track of one of her big orchestral albums two decades ago, and it ended up here in a heart-felt version that gives the lie to Will Freidwald’s denigration of the song in his book on Frank Sinatra (who covered it during one of his attempts to seem “with-it” in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s) that “Both Sides Now” doesn’t build to any sort of emotional climax but “just drones on and on.” Though I had the same problem with “The Joni Mitchell Songbook” that I’ve had with similar PBS tributes to Woody Guthrie – songs that were light, fast uptempo numbers in their creator’s recordings were slowed down and turned into Great Monuments of American Culture – one thing I really liked about the show is it showcased just how fine a melodist Joni Mitchell is. A lot of singer-songwriters seem to regard the tunes as just a vehicle to carry the words; Mitchell’s music, especially as heard here, is complex and rich in its own right. There’s enough musical meat and sinew in Mitchell’s music, quite apart from the sincere if sometimes convoluted poetry of their lyrics, to give Mendoza plenty to work with as an arranger and conductor. “The Joni Mitchell Songbook” allowed me to hear aspects of Joni Mitchell’s music I’d never heard before, which is what a good tribute concert should do.

And I really liked her drummer, Brian Blade, a jazz-influenced player who said that Mitchell herself sets the tempo with the right hand of her guitar playing, and all he has to do is follow her lead and play fills and breaks behind her. That was also something KT Tunstall had said about her music on her 2019 Live at the Belly Up appearance: she said the record producer on her first album had noticed that she set the basic rhythm herself and told the drummer to follow her rhythm instead of trying to set the tempo himself. Blade also said that when he first played with Joni Mitchell, it was just the two of them,and he had to get used to playing her songs with a 50-piece orchestra. He obviously learned to do very well, because his jazz-influenced polyrhythmic drumming helped add life to the music and keep the simple beauty of Mitchell’s songs from being drowned out in an ocean of strings.