Joni’s Jazz Reviewed: Short on rarities but steeped in a love of the genre

Sprawling compilation collects Joni Mitchell’s most jazz-inspired work.

by Grayson Haver Currin
MOJO
September 4, 2025

For the first dozen years of her career, or until she released 1976's masterly Hejira, Joni Mitchell was one of music's most revealing songwriters, limning the folds and fault lines of her emotions and experiences with staggering clarity. And for the last half-decade, across four volumes, the Joni Mitchell Archives have undertaken one of the most revealing studies of any living songwriter, showing not only the routes Mitchell took to reach milestones including Blue and Court And Spark but also unfolding the map to suggest avenues she opted not to explore.

Late last year, the Archives reached the end of the '70s, or the close of what conventional wisdom wrongly holds as her only great albums. It is logical, then, for the work to turn now to thematic excavation, as it does on the 61-track, career-spanning sprawl of Joni's Jazz. "Produced for release by Joni Mitchell," it also includes laudatory words from Herbie Hancock and the late Wayne Shorter and a brief remembrance from Mitchell herself. The set is sweeping, taking as one endpoint 1968's Song To A Seagull and as the other her apostle-assisted performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022.

It zigs and zags through her albums with an express purpose: to prove that Mitchell has always engaged with jazz, even in her flowing days of folk, and that jazz luminaries including Metheny and Mingus, Hancock and Pastorius only escalated that propensity.

On these terms, of course, the set is marvellous. Hear the way Mitchell moves like vapour, for instance, through the melodic and rhythmic shifts of 2007's Shine, or how she merges with Shorter's soprano saxophone at the end of Paprika Plains, from '77's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. Reconsider the way her voice hangs over the piano chords during opener Blue when you hear her update that technique two decades - or, here, six tracks - later during Night Ride Home track Come In From The Cold. Gershwin-sized questions linger here about what Mitchell considers jazz; no question remains, however, that its pull has always pushed her.

Unlike the four prior archival editions, Joni's Jazz gives listeners very little that's new - a pair of unreleased demos from 1980, a few deep cuts from earlier boxes, an easy-to-overlook but spirited rendition of Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man alongside bassist Kyle Eastwood and his brassy band, from 1998. It is tempting to see it, then, as a chaotic but mostly coherent and sometimes very compelling streaming playlist, given deluxe physical form.

This isn't a set for the diggers, then, but those rarities are meant to support the wider ideas, anyway. Backed only by Guerin, then her ex, during that Be Cool demo, Mitchell seems to delight as she scat-sings, playing inside the space that Shorter and Russell Ferrante would soon fill on 1982's Wild Things Run Fast. Likewise, a decade later, she revels in the wordless twists and turns of her voice during an early version of Two Grey Rooms, singing inside the sound like a painter imagining how their brushstrokes may eventually appear on canvas. Indeed, perhaps the real gift of this set's largesse is putting Mitchell's frequently dismissed work from the '80s onward in conversation with what came earlier, and those latter works often uphold their end. If there was jazz at the start for Mitchell, it never vanished.