Back when she was loosening her ties to the folk world to explore jazz and world music, Joni Mitchell was asked about her career goals. There was only one, she replied: "To remain interested in the music."
Nearly 20 years after distilling her artistry to those six well-chosen words, Mitchell is on the phone from California and pondering a new question: Has she succeeded?
"It died for me a few years ago, and I intended to quit," Mitchell replies. "But a few things have happened to give me a new enthusiasm. And then I began spending time with my daughter and grandson." Last year, Mitchell was reunited with the child she put up for adoption 35 years ago, when the singer was a struggling, if not starving, young artist. She has no other children and is unmarried.
"I was recording some music with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock recently and they were going on and on about my (vocal) tone, which was odd because I've known and worked with those guys for years, so why should it different now?" she says. "And the only thing I can think of is that the coming of my family has done something to my central core. It's like there was a hole in there that is fleshed-out now."
Born in Canada but now living in California, her home for several decades, Mitchell is slowly re-emerging from a long period of artistic seclusion.
For Chicagoans, and in particular for the Old Town School of Folk Music, that is good news. On Sept. 18, Old Town is bringing Mitchell to the city to perform for the first time in 15 years. The occasion is a benefit concert (tickets are $2,500) to open its new home, the Chicago Folk Center at 4544 N. Lincoln Ave. Mitchell will play solo, a reminder of her mid-'60s coffeehouse youth when her finely honed songs won raves and were being covered by performers such as Judy Collins (who had a hit with Mitchell's "Both Sides Now") and Tom Rush ("The Circle Game"). Soon after, Mitchell and her rapturous multi-octave voice invaded the national consciousness with indelible songs such as "Big Yellow Taxi," "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris."
She was a beacon for songwriters and thinkers, forlorn lovers and closet poets, pop fanatics who loved her tunes and jazzers who were wowed by her unconventional chords. Her effect on aspiring female rock and pop musicians was incalculable.
"Her writing was so good -- so literate, so descriptive," says Lucinda Williams, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who calls Mitchell an inspiration. "The fact that she was a woman and writing that way -- there really weren't that many women doing that then. Judy Collins was there, and Joan Baez, but neither of them wrote the way Joni Mitchell did. That's why she made such a big impression on me and a whole bunch of other women who were picking up guitars."
Mitchell could easily have parlayed her penchant for introspective lyrics and memorable folk melodies into a career like James Taylor's, by creating variations on a successful formula that caters to a huge, loyal audience. But she chose a different path. For her, maintaining interest in the music meant pushing beyond the familiar. Folk -- or any genre, for that matter -- could never hope to contain her.
"I came into the folk scene because it was easy and I did it as a hobby in art school to make some money -- there was never any ambition or desire to be a performing animal," she says. Mitchell instead aspired to become a painter, and although she has become one (her artwork consistently adorns her album covers and has been exhibited around the world), she found in music a world of seemingly infinite possibility.
Searching for chords
"I started out in folk with simple chords, but very soon an appetite for broader chords came about that weren't even on the guitar, so I began twiddling with tunings," she says. "Even in the coffeehouses where I was working in Detroit, they went jazz after hours and it was the jazz musicians who started playing my stuff because they were intrigued by it harmonically.
"I've always been an `adjacent folkie' -- it was just that it took me six records to find a band to play my music. The rhythms were too intricate for folk-rock, because my harmonies were not very `white,' like James Taylor's or Carole King's, where everything was in a major or minor key. My emotional makeup is a bit vaguer -- my life is going nicely, but always with a kind of dissonance going through it. And I gravitated toward wider chords, `black' voicings out of gospel and jazz because they mirrored what I was feeling."
After the commercial triumph of "Court and Spark" (1974), Mitchell ventured into this more esoteric territory on "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" (1975), which was castigated by Rolling Stone magazine as the year's worst album. Though Mitchell's hits dwindled, she kept following her muse, collaborating with the late jazz legend Charlie Mingus, incorporating Latin percussion and African drumming, and hiring adventurous jazz musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius who gave her music a dreamy, searching, open- ended quality. She hadn't abandoned melody, just made it more complex. Her wordplay became denser and more politically pointed, her singing less showy and more nuanced -- like a jazzer she became expert at finding the drama in a phrase.
But by the early '90s, Mitchell was getting frustrated speaking to the same band of 200,000 loyal album buyers every time out. "I'd been blacklisted from things (such as MTV, VH1 and commercial radio), for reasons that are still not clear to me other than, `That's the way it is,' " she says. "I was doing good work, but record companies don't stay long with artists anymore if you're not selling a certain number of records. My work has been called too jazzy and too high-minded, and perhaps it is. But there has to be a counterforce. And I'm sick of thinking deep for others. If no one is interested -- I'd rather not."
Live performances had become laborious because they required an armada of guitars to accommodate the 50 tunings she used in her songs. Then, a week before what was to be her last concert in New Orleans two years ago, she was introduced to a new technology -- the Roland VG-8 Guitar System -- that allowed her to dial up a new tuning in an instant.
"It was a dream -- it solved a lot of my problems and gave me new enthusiasm for performing," she says.
A new album, "Taming the Tiger" (Reprise), due out Sept. 29, reflects that enthusiasm. It is a lush, haunting work: "Stay in Touch" captures the first enigmatic pangs of romance with a lingering melody loosely based on a classical work by Rachmaninov, while "Harlem in Havana" is a sly update of Cab Calloway's mirthful brand of jazz. "Lead Balloon" is a fierce, funny swipe at corporate arrogance, while "My Best to You" is an atmospheric interpretation of a 1940s cowboy-swing tune.
Joni's high profile
It arrives at a time when Mitchell is enjoying her highest artistic profile since the '70s. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince sings her praises; Janet Jackson prominently incorporates a sample from "Yellow Taxi" into her recent hit "Got 'Til It's Gone"; Billboard magazine recognizes her career achievements with its 1995 Century Award; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year votes her into the pantheon alongside Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
Mitchell seems unimpressed by it all. She knows too well how the music business works. "The hip syndrome manipulates the money machine in America," she says. "The American public is so afraid not to be hip they are constantly manipulated into needing the new thing. That's how commerce works. I've managed to maintain a certain amount of originality because I've never been much to stay within the boundaries of any camp. Through some kind of stubborn loner-ness, my inability to become a joiner, I've come to this place."
Mitchell pauses to drag on a cigarette. "You know, I played at the site of the original Woodstock the other day, and I took my kids -- my daughter and my grandson had never seen me perform -- and the audience was wonderful. Some people held up a poster 6 feet long saying `Joni's Jazz,' which was encouraging, because the tendency of my music toward jazz is not for everybody. I sang `Woodstock,' which was comically beautiful, because I wasn't in attendance at the original concert. But, I saw the movie."
Mitchell laughs her deep, nicotine laugh. She is in feisty spirits, opinionated and in love with the art of conversation, in love with art itself. At 54, she says her best days are still ahead. "It's so funny, I'm in this youth-oriented music business, yet artists, composers, painters -- you don't really come into your own until you're in your 50s. It takes that long for you to assimilate your influences and make something of your own from them."
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