Joni Mitchell, Jazz Artist?

by Phil Freeman
Stereogum
September 25, 2025

Is Joni Mitchell a jazz artist? Short answer: No. Long answer: No, but...

Nevertheless, there's a new box set, 61 tracks and just under five hours long, called Joni's Jazz that pulls tracks from 1968's Song To A Seagull all the way up to 2023's At Newport, recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival. The cover features a photo of Mitchell with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, and both men are featured extensively. Did you know Shorter played on 10 of Mitchell's albums? I didn't until I watched the two-part Amazon documentary about him.

Other jazz musicians heard on the set include saxophonists Michael Brecker and Tom Scott; flugelhornist Kenny Wheeler; keyboardist Joe Sample; guitarists Larry Carlton, Lionel Loueke, and Pat Metheny; bassists Dave Holland and Jaco Pastorius; and drummers Brian Blade, Vinnie Colaiuta, Peter Erskine, and John Guerin. And that's without even bringing up her 1979 album Mingus, a collaboration with the legendary bassist/composer (ill with motor neuron disease, he didn't perform).

Here is where I admit that I have never explored Joni Mitchell's catalog in any depth. The only album of hers I've heard front to back is Blue, which is an astonishing record but has no jazz elements at all. Listening to this box - which Mitchell assembled herself, and which is dedicated to Shorter - I get a very clear picture of an artist who understands jazz, hears what jazz musicians can do for her songs, and collaborates with them in that spirit.

The liner notes include quotes from a 2013 interview with Shorter, who describes their collaboration, saying, "It mostly worked like, when we did a take, one take or something like that, we'd do another one, and then she would say, 'Do you have any more of that?' And then we'd do another take, something like that. 'You got any more in you?'... It was always like whatever happens, happen. She knew I was not the kind of person you could ask, 'Can you play something this way? Can you do it this way?' Uh-uh. None of that."

Similarly, Hancock, who was invited to the Mingus sessions by Pastorius, recalls, "I was thinking I might have to back off of certain things I might have done if it was just Jaco and Wayne, who were already doing cutting-edge stuff in jazz. But Joni actually said, 'No, no. You go ahead and paint pictures, do whatever you want to do with the music.' Then when she started to sing along with us, she fit in so easily, I was shocked."

Although there are tracks from earlier releases here, the common narrative is that Mitchell's jazz-influenced material begins with 1974's Court And Spark, on which she employed members of Tom Scott's band the L.A. Express. Drummer John Guerin was featured on that record and the three after it (The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter); he and Mitchell were also a couple in that era. In a 1976 interview, he says, "When she started Court And Spark, she needed more sophisticated jazz players to handle the musical part. She needed the broad musical background that jazz musicians are capable of today. I feel being a jazz musician makes me more open." But he adds, "I use the term 'jazz' for the want of a better label. Jazz doesn't mean what it used to mean years ago."

In her 2024 book Traveling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell, critic Ann Powers addresses this aspect of Mitchell's work at length. She quotes Mitchell telling L.A. Times critic Robert Hilburn in 2008, "Some people thought I was trying to do jazz and not quite getting it, but I wasn't. The only thing I have in common with jazz is sometimes experimental rhythms, and these wide harmonies that are outside the rules of jazz." But Powers ultimately comes around to filing Mitchell's 1970s albums under the heading of fusion, which she describes as "not quite jazz, not quite rock, not quite funk, not able to elude any of these categories and become something totally new."

I agree with this 100%. I've been thinking for years about fusion as a zone that encompasses much more than the artists most commonly identified with it: Miles Davis, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, et al. To me, the jazz orchestrations on their glorious 1970s albums make Earth, Wind & Fire a fusion act. Santana's mix of spiritual trance-jazz, explosive Latin percussion and amp-frying guitar solos? Fusion. Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard's high-flying trumpet solos, laid over lush proto-disco rhythms? Fusion. The Fania All Stars jamming in the studio with keyboardist Jan Hammer and drummer Billy Cobham of Mahavishnu Orchestra, and bringing guitarist Jorge Santana and African saxophonist Manu Dibango onstage at Yankee Stadium? Fusion for sure.

Powers takes this line of thinking even farther than I had; her list of "the Black pop elites who belong in the history of jazz fusion if we put Joni there, too" includes Bill Withers, Valerie Simpson, Gil Scott-Heron, Earth, Wind & Fire, Isaac Hayes, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, post-Supremes Diana Ross, post - Muscle Shoals Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Labi Siffre, Patrice Rushen, the Persuaders, the Sylvers, the Spinners, the Main Ingredient, Tower Of Power, War, and Roberta Flack. And there are many more names that could be added. (If I'm not careful, this might become the subject of my next book.)

One track in particular struck me as a near-perfect example of Mitchell as fusion artist: "Paprika Plains," from Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, which is tucked into the middle of the third disc here. First of all, it's 16 minutes long. She's playing piano solo for the first two minutes or so, before an orchestra conducted by Michael Gibbs rises up behind her, interacting beautifully with her vocal and pianistic melodies - subtly at first, then with huge swirls of color. It's not until the final three minutes of the piece that the rhythm section arrives: Jaco Pastorius on bass, Guerin on drums, and - in a way that reminds me of Steely Dan's "Aja," on which he also performed - a major solo from Wayne Shorter. It's a genuine epic, something I wasn't expecting at all.

Still, since I came to Joni's Jazz almost entirely unfamiliar with her work, I thought I should get some additional perspectives on what she was doing. I reached out to two friends and Mitchell fans, bassist/composer Linda May Han Oh and singer-songwriter John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, for their thoughts.

I asked each of them if they thought of Mitchell as a jazz artist, or as a singer-songwriter working with jazz musicians, or something in between. Oh said simply, "Something in-between, but I don't think it really matters."

Darnielle's response was deeper, but aligned. He said, "I don't think of Mitchell's music as jazz, no; she is a singer-songwriter, that's a specific category. But there are a lot of ways to do it. There's folk singer-songwriters and there's rock singer-songwriters and there are electronic singer-songwriters (Neil Tennant probably the most obvious example here), and other genres; Michael Franks is kind of a smooth jazz singer-songwriter, if you buy 'smooth jazz' as a genre and not a marketing category." He compared her with Bob Dylan as the two major figures coming out of folk music, but where Dylan embraced rock, Mitchell embraced jazz: "she lets jazz transform her craft, she's completely open to it."

He ended up in the same area as Oh, though, saying, "I don't think it matters at all what we call it unless we enjoy categorizing as a sort of armchair game - I think most of the musicians who've worked with her are in the 'it's all just music' realm of thought about this, which I think is the right realm. Either a person is a player or isn't. Mitchell's ensembles in this period are all players, and she's one, too."

I also wanted to know what made her music jazz or jazzy; was it the chords, the timbres, the rhythms? As a non-musician, what should I be listening for?

Oh said, "Joni's melodies are quite unique and distinct. They can often be elaborate and winding in a way that really emphasizes her profound poetry. Perhaps part of the parallel with jazz-informed music is that sometimes melodies within jazz can be quite elaborate and winding. Additionally, I love the use of harmony and key changes within her music; many of my favorite jazz compositions move through multiple tonalities. Even in her song 'The Fiddle And The Drum' [from 1969's Clouds; not included on Joni's Jazz], Joni is only singing one line a cappella with no accompaniment, but nevertheless the song moves through a few keys and tonalities with a sense of clarity, due to the strength of the single melody."

Finally, I wanted to know what impressed them the most about the way she worked with the jazz musicians she used on her records. What did she bring out of them? What did they give her?

Oh said, "Part of what is special to me about Joni's music and musicianship is her openness and appreciation for experimentation with the musicians who worked with her. Musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny have brought exciting richness to her music. Often you can hear an open dialogue within the songs between the musicians and Joni. My favorite examples of that include the Shadows And Light album and the Mingus album."

Darnielle added, "I think Mitchell's melodies take wing when she gets the right players; I think she could write all these songs all by herself but I also suspect she enjoys showing how good she is to players who are able to appreciate it, and elevates her practice when she's in that company." He added, "I think most jazz musicians, when asked to play on a date, are mainly asking whether the gig is a good time and who they'll be playing with; musicians play music, they generally prefer to play with people who can play on their level, I think it's fair to say. It takes one listen to 'Both Sides Now' for any musician to say, wow, that's one of those tunes with legs, not just anybody can write like that; and by the time Wayne Shorter gets a phone call, she's done not only Blue (not jazz, but a masterpiece by any standard), but For The Roses, Court And Spark...Shorter loves knotty, look-at-'em-sideways melodies, he can hear where the spaces are in the music, and she's already shown her facility by then. I'd guess he thought, 'my practice and hers are similar in different genres, I'd have something to say in this musical context.'"

Joni's Jazz is a very wide-ranging box; it includes not only her own compositions played by all the musicians discussed above and more, but also her versions of jazz tunes like "Comes Love," "You're My Thrill," "Sometimes I'm Happy," "Summertime," "Stormy Weather," and Annie Ross's "Twisted," and a pretty amazing version of Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man" backed by a big band led by, of all people, Kyle Eastwood (Clint's bass-playing son). If you're new to her work, as I was, or just want to consider it from a potentially new angle, it's a great starting point.