Sunday Joni Mitchell Blogging

Taking a real risky opinion here! Court & Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns are both very good albums, but Blue is perfect down to every note.

April first is still a long way off, dude.

2: Blur. Radiohead. U2. Quite a few really when you think about it. Even Madonna sounds very different from “Material Girl”.

I will go out on another limb and confess that I’ve never really seen it; I just find her irritating.

Talk Talk’s later albums bear little resemblance to their earlier, but I believe success eluded them.

Gotta go with rm on the canonicity thing here: for heaven’s sake, there’s an MLA panel on her work this year. Not a big fan of Summer Lawns –prefer Hejira.

hejira also for the brilliance of jaco pastorius, the lester young to her billie h.

on the other hand, i think her most innovative melodies were behind her by that time.

blue? c&s? can’t & won’t choose.

and, no, u2 and madonna are not even vaguely comparable. that’s like listing billy joel because he had hits that were pastiches from different genres.

Helen’s link:

dsquared: Kid A does fit the bill (but don’t their more recent albums sound a lot like their early stuff?), but with Blur & U2 you could argue that they were just moving into areas well trodden by others, which has exactly been Madonna’s thing. I have the impression that in the mid 70s there was an idea of complex pop made for adults by adults which got abandoned by mainstream record companies, presumably because it was a lot easier to sell loads of BeeGees records.

Clearly we should dismiss any musician who gets onto a trend once its gets going. That’s bandwagon jumping, and no decent music ever came out of that. Take that , Bach.

I’m waiting for the Final Countdown to be mashed with the theme from Channel 4’s Countdown…

Is there any black electronic music catering to working-class sensibilities?

A lot of pioneering late-70s and 80s dance music was precisely this [and often gay, too]. Chicago house, Detroit techno, UK drum’n’bass, New York garage, etc.

Further, dsquared has a point re: Blur — the various stages in Albarn’s work are considerably more heterogeneous than anything Joni Mitchell has done. From Stone Roses influenced baggy pop to ‘Chinese opera’ and electronica?

kid bitzer:

I think you hit the nail on the head with “hejira also for the brilliance of jaco pastorius, the lester young to her billie h.”

Nicely said, and that’s why I think “Mingus” followed closely by “Hejira” is one of the finest recordings of popular music I have ever heard. Joni’s brief and apparently rarely recorded collaboration with Jaco is one of the most remarkably beautiful and sympathetic pairings I am aware of. I’m generally not a fan of fusion, but his hands, her voice, and those idiosyncratic compositions seemed to settle into sublimity on those two records.

If by “complex pop made for adults by adults” you mean predominantly white, non-electronic music catering to middle-class sensibilities you might have a point, but I’m having a hard time dismissing everything that doesn’t fit into that category as unserious and juvenile.

Yes, the words “complex” and “adults” are the villains here. I think they’re most easily defined in this context by what they’re not: music associated with mall-rats, clubs, driving, ‘top 40’, etc. I don’t think of, say, Gordon Lightfoot as being ‘complex’, but he did ‘adult’ themes. Steely Dan back in the day did rather more complex music than a lot of kids were really comfortable with – I think that fifteen years later they would have been classed under ‘college radio’ – but I’m not sure about the ‘adult’ part.

Let I be misunderstood let me get a few things straight:

Firstly the sociology of popular music is notoriously difficult and vague. Also, it has gotten much more complex over the last couple of decades, because popular music splintered into a whole slew of not easily definable sub-genres and there simply isn’t any one style so dominant as to define an “age” or something like that. So all such classifications should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, one can have a little fun making such differentiations.

Secondly, I said “predominantly”, not “exclusively”.

And finally, when I defined one such genre as “predominantly white, non-electronic music catering to middle-class sensibilities”, I certainly didn’t mean to say that all the music not fitting this category was mainly black, working class or synth based – that would be totally ridiculous and inaccurate.

since the mid-70’s, popular music has become more youth-oriented. More homogenized since sometime in the early 80’s/late 90’s, and with simpler melodic lines.

I really don’t think this is true. For one, people similar to those who used to listen to Carole King, Joni Mitchell or Stevie Wonder nowadays listen to e.g. Beth Orton, Alanis Morissette or Dido, to David Gray, Damien Rice or Coldplay. So both the genre and the focus group are still around. Also, bands like (from the top of my head) Kraftwerk, The Fugees, Radiohead, Faithless, Portishead, Thievery Corporation or Goldfrapp don’t lack complexity in their music or are particularly youth oriented and they definitely don’t sound all the same. They probably won’t appeal to most people over 50 or those who are middle-aged, married with children and have a mortgage, but I know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who listen to stuff like that. So, if anything, both the musical landscape and the sociology of the listeners has become much more complex, rather than more homogenized.

Anyone else have “Song for Sharon” (from Hejira) as a Joni fave? It has a great bass line (though maybe not Pastorius, who’s not on all that album) and some of her best lyrics: “Well there’s a wide, wide world of noble causes/And lovely landscapes to discover/But all I really want to do right now/Is find another lover,” plus the bit about “skating after golden Reggie” back in Maidstone, Saskatchewan. But maybe I like that partly because of the Canadian angle. What a song, though.

the idea that mainstream pop musicians could really develop

Does anyone demand that or are they looking for good work?

I saw Joni Mitchell in New Haven right after she released Court and Spark. The song that I remember the most vividly was “A Case of You” from Blue. She stepped away from the band and it was just her and the dulcimer. Her voice and music filled the whole Coliseum. It was incredible.

Why would I listen to Alanis Morissette when I can listen to Joni Mitchell? Nowhere near the same range lyrically, musically or vocally.

Speaking of dubious mash-up projects, I have a very bad idea: a mash-up of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” with Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals“. Obviously you would have to call it “Smooth Little Criminals”.

But only if you work a few bars of “Short People” in there, too.

OK, CT is Joni-land. That explains a lot.

I like parts “For the Roses”, but tend to find her annoying when she isn’t at her very best.

I read an interview and apparently she’s a completely self-taught, intuitive, by-ear musician who finds things on her guitar without knowing what they are. (At least when she did the interview). A lot of musicians can’t read music, but usually they’ve had pretty demanding apprenticeships in whichever style they play.

I read an interview and apparently she’s a completely self-taught, intuitive, by-ear musician who finds things on her guitar without knowing what they are.

This is my general experience with pop music folks, the demanding apprenticeship being crashing and burning on stage.

The fundamentals of guitar are not really that hard to pick up. Writing interesting music is the trick.

I was unaware until almost two years ago that C,S,N &Y’s “Woodstock” was a Joni Mitchell song. When I heard her sing it, I finally got it. Ineffable. Transporting.

That said, I will straight-up murder your ass if you try to talk to me about the Summer of Love. There is little I hate more than the hippie zeitgeist.
.

Dan Levitan’s discussion with her in This is Your Brain on Music makes her sound very knowledgeable about the musical properties of her tunings and chords: she says Jaco Pastorius was the only bass player who understood them well enough to play properly with her. (It’s about how the chords leave it open what the root is, and only he could play in a way that maintained that ambiguity.)

It’s about how the chords leave it open what the root is

this is a large part of what I find annoying, and Pastorius doesn’t really help.

Bloix, I think that the alternate tunings and unique picking style are marks of an autodidact. That’s not rare in music history. Her songwriting was unpredictable too.

There’s something I didn’t quite like about her style, except on individual pieces (“Cold Blue Steel and Sweetfire”), but it was pretty immediately evident that she wasn’t a regular rock / folk musician doing three-chord songs out of a songbook.

Satie and Musorgsky were classical musicians whose original and influential music was often thought to be crude and incompetent. Musorgsky was almost completely self-taught, whereas Satie had a fair degree of training but not a thorough grounding. They’re both exceptions to the supposed rule that you have to master the old stuff before you can do new and original stuff.

A very talented autodidact, I should have said. For all I know Ted Nugent was an autodidact too.

Hawaiian guitar is another example of autodidact music.

Grand Moff Texan 12.09.08 at 4:12 pm:
…if you try to talk to me about the Summer of Love. There is little I hate more than the hippie zeitgeist…
Aside from its being the title of a song by the always willing to cash in on youth trends Beach Boys, the signified content of the phrase “Summer of Love” has no more substance than any other 2-dimensional media creation.
Scammers and opportunists trying to ride what was building organically and spontaneously, looking for someplace to sell something.
First came the changes, then the reportage.
Stuff like the SF Human Be-in and what it gathered in was scary for a lot of the risk-averse in the culture of the time.
The adoption in 1966 by mainstream journalists of the word “hippie”, a derogatory jazzbo term for wanna-be hipsters, was for negative identification purposes. Whatever was being described there already existed without a name, and was seriously diminished, altered and degraded by the mass media’s coverage. Co-opted in the vernacular of the time.
There was a funeral service, called “Death of Hippie” in SF, Oct 1967. The Diggers, who worked it up, the grand anarchist and folk hero Emmett Grogan first among equals therein, were prime examples of what was worrying the larger culture, so much so they went to great pains to ridicule and trivialize it.
The image that resulted from that ridiculing and trivializing, and its subsequent adoption and propagation by the children of the media, is, I believe, what you’re reacting to with such disdain.

D-A-C#-F#-A-D
5th string 5th fret, 4th string 5th fret, 3rd string 3rd fret
up 5
repeat until satisfied
barre 5th w/ 4th string 6th fret, hammer on 5th and 2nd strings 7th fret
back to original chord
5th string 4th fret, 4th string 3rd fret, 3rd string 3rd fret, 2nd string 4th fret
” ” from 5th string second fret (down 2), hammer on/off 5th and 2nd string
back to original chord

There is no relationship between alternate tunings and folk or being an autodidact. Classical guitarists use a range of alternate tunings: for instance, lute tuning. Look everyone has blind spots. Its fine not to get some style of music or particular performer. But have a little humility, and don’t hold your blind spot up as ineffeable wisdom.

dsquared, I bow to the wealth of evidence cited. If by alternate tunings one means any departure from EADGBE, then I would guess about a third of the classical repertoire is in an alternate tuning. I doubt that a third of folk music departs from standard tuning (though a very high percentage of delta blues uses an open tuning).

Neil, Where do you get the idea that a third of the classical repertoire is in alternate tunings?

There’s a fair bit of low-D scordatura in the late Romantic period [and some earlier] but, taking the classical repertoire as a whole, 1/3rd is massively overstating it. Drop-D barely counts as an alternate tuning at all.

I take it by lute tuning you mean tuning the G string down a semi-tone? Capo-ing up 3 frets? or what?

The vast bulk of all of the classical repertoire uses either standard EADGBE or D scordatura tunings. Anything else is rare.

For what it’s worth, the vast bulk of jazz and popular guitar players are self-taught. I know many who are players of great technical proficiency and theoretical acumen, but they are, nonetheless, autodidacts. That doesn’t make them musical ignoramuses, and it’s also quite true that it’s fairly typical for self-taught players to disparage or conceal their knowledge of theory.

I’ve seen an instructional video by a very famous rock player in which he talks at length about his own ignorance of chord names and theory. He’s adamant that he doesn’t know the names for the stuff he plays and then, 30 minutes later, in the same video, he turns to the camera and say [with a straight face, and contradicting everything he said before] “of course I usually play with diminished arpeggios over dominant 7th tonalities and I really like that phrygian dominant harmony you get with the flat 9.”

Tuning 1 string down a tone hardly constitutes much of an alternate tuning, it’s just not that different from standard tuning, and it isn’t really that common anyway.

I’d be very very surprised — given the explosion in composition for the guitar at the start of the 19th century — if a large proportion of the decent music playable on guitar is in fact music that requires ‘lute’ tuning.

For a start, it’s only renaissance lute music that can be played ‘straight’ on a guitar with the G string retuned. Anything later, and this would include all of the great Baroque repertoire [Weiss, and the like] and it’s not really music that can be played on guitar at all. Rather, it’s music that gets transcribed for guitar, just as Bach’s cello music or violin music gets transcribed for guitar.

You are really stretching here if you are including music written for another instrument, but sometimes playable on the guitar if the guitar is retuned, and often only playable at all if the music is rearranged or retranscribed as ‘guitar repertoire’.

The guitar is a late-18th/early-19th century instrument and the vast bulk of the music ever written for that instrument was written for standard tuning [or standard tuning with the e string down one tone].

Also, getting into value judgments, I’d argue that most of the decent music for the guitar was in fact written in the 19th century.

Neil,

Mertz is rubbish? Regondi? Legnani? Arcas? Seriously, you think Mertz is execrable rubbish? No accounting for taste, I suppose.

The fact that you happen to prefer the renaissance and baroque repertoire written for the lute doesn’t make your claim re: guitars and tunings true.

Your claim (which is basically that) ‘the music I like, written for a ‘guitar-like’ instrument was composed for a tuning that wasn’t EADGBE’ isn’t remotely the same thing as ‘a third of the classical repertoire for the guitar is in an alternate tuning’. It just isn’t.

Purely as a matter of personal taste, your claim that 50% of all decent guitar-like music being from the renaissance is so crazily insane it barely deserves addressing.

It’s just not the case. Some of that repertoire is great, no denying it. Dowland, de Visee, etc. But it’s not true that it comprises that big a percentage of the guitar repertoire as a whole. It just doesn’t.

And vast swathes of the 19th century ‘early-romantic’ repertoire isn’t characterized by ‘arpeggios’ at all.

I don’t mean to sound incredibly argumentative here, arguing about musical taste gets silly very quickly, but the factual claim about guitar tunings is just false. It only gets remotely plausible via some fairly tortured reasoning.

Much of this music was only discovered in the 80s. There are basically no recordings of Mertz prior to the early 80s. However, there are a lot of recent recordings of Mertz. The Regondi material is extremely difficult and there’s not a lot of of it, but it’s increasingly recorded.

It doesn’t sound like you’ve actually listened to much Mertz or Regondi [apologies if I’m wrong here].

Bream is on record as rating Giuliani very highly, though, much higher than Sor and has recorded a great deal of Aguado and other 19th century composers. His opinion here is diametrically opposite to yours.

Bream had great taste in commissioning 20th century composers to write for him, and is a huge figure in the construction of the 20th century repertoire for the guitar, but he’s not someone really to rely on for either the renaissance stuff or the 19th century material post-Giuliani.

You are right, I have never listened to Mertz. I have played through some, and I thought that was enough. Perhaps there is some gems in his work that I have missed, but I remain sceptical. The truth is there is almost nothing in the entire repertoire that would be a loss to the world of music apart from the renaissance: nothing really significant. The great composers never wrote for guitar (except for some Lieder by Schubert, which I believe exist in guitar as well as piano accompaniment versions). Lemuel’s example is a good one: it is indeed one of the high points of the repertoire. But it is very far from an essential piece of music. Whatever you think of Aguado or Guiliani, you can’t think there are first-rank composers… can you?

The best arrangements of the Schubert lieder for guitar are by … Mertz.

I think some of Regondi’s guitar compositions — his Introduction and Caprice, op. 23 — and some of Mertz [the Bardenklange are very nice miniatures and his arrangements of Schubert and some 19th c. opera arias are very good] stand up well in comparison to similar piano repertoire of the time. It’s salon music, but it’s good salon music. Some of Napoleon Coste’s from the same period is also good.

Does it bear comparison with Beethoven? Well, clearly not.

The problem with the mid-19th century romantic repertoire for the guitar is that the stuff that finds its way into publication in anthologies and albums of sheet music is not their best stuff. The concert pieces are just too difficult for guitar players who aren’t of a really high standard. So it’s not especially well known and the pieces that are best known by those composers are really just etudes [like Coste’s and some of Legnani’s] or miniatures [like some by Mertz].

Where is this huge repertoire of renaissance stuff by composers who are of the ‘first-rank’?

To elaborate further, I wasn’t making a general statement about classical, folk, autodidacts and alternate tunings. I was making a specific statement or conjecture about Joni Mitchell based in part on her unique guitar style.

Another way to put it is that most rock/folk guitarists only play chords that they’ve learned, often a very limited range of them, whereas I think that autodidacts play chords that she’d found.

Another way to put it is that most rock/folk guitarists only play chords that they’ve learned, often a very limited range of them, whereas I think that autodidacts play chords that she’d found.

I agree – anecdotal evidence only! – with the first two clauses, but I think “autodidact” applies to a healthy majority of those boring people as well. That she taught herself did not make her playing unique, her playing is unique because she is an artist in a sea of craftsmen.

You should pick up a guitar. It’s not exceedingly hard to play like the Nuge, and it follows that it’s not that hard to be better and more interesting.

Can you attach a slide to the hand? The pedal steel guitar needs more attention from creative people. They’re wonderful instruments and very satisfying to just noodle with.