Translated by Flavio La Bruna

Joni Mitchell, Magnetic Style

ANNIVERSARIES: ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL MUSIC SCENE TURNS 80. The Canadian singer-songwriter in the words of those who have been close to her in life and those who adore her records. «I think that in a century people will remember the Beatles, Bob Dylan and her», Graham Nash

The Lady of the Canyon, of the Yellow Taxi and of the Roses turns eighty. With the blasé elegance of someone who has seen, experienced, loved, competed, fought a lot in life. Including an aneurysm in 2015 that stole her for many years the two most beautiful things that nature gave to her, as well as an immeasurable talent: her voice and her hands for painting. Joni Mitchell enters the ninth decade of her extraordinary and restless life, and she does it preceded by a live album recorded in the summer of last year which is a gift to the world and to herself, for having managed to survive and stubbornly tamed the forced silence of the disease: Live at Newport. A poignant wonder prepared with stubborn will in informal home sessions, as she gradually began to speak again and rediscover "her" voice, hoarse and torn by time, cigarettes and illness, but indomitable and flexible perhaps like never before. A silver soprano who became a contralto of substance.

DESTINY IN THE STARS

Master of ceremonies on stage was singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who is half or almost half Joni's age, and who properly introduced Joni Mitchell's unexpected entrance on stage with a "Newport angels, let's make history together." And history passed on the wings of some of the most beautiful songs of the last century, Big Yellow Taxi (which is not a ride-hailing vehicle, but what they called police vans in Canada!), Both Sides Now, inspired by Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, A Case of You, one of the urgent and proud songs Joni wrote about the end of her intense relationship with Graham Nash. And many other wonders.

Joni was born November 7, 1943, in Fort McLeod, Canada. The immense and little-remembered country that gave famous popular giants such as Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, just to mention the best known, who would later relocate in the USA, the sovereign center of irradiation of all successful rock and surroundings, as England has served as a beacon for Europe. Her astrological picture, for those who believe in the paths of the stars rather indifferent to our fate, is that of a Scorpio woman with Cancer ascendant. According to astrologers, a talent with a magnetic personality, endowed with an immediate and non-negotiable charisma: it's just there. Like charm, which, again according to the interpreters of star maps, has an ease in relating to others, but always keeping in mind its tail ready to strike whoever it believes has struck it. Everyone reads the signs as they want, but there are several things beyond doubt that fall into this stereotyped narrative of destinies linked to the stars: Joni Mitchell is a charismatic, magnetic woman of immense talent and absolute charm. A magnificent album of hers, the first that to some extent created for her the dazzling chemical reaction between the forms of rock ballad and the sophisticated jazz syntax that she had intuited (a path that would culminate in Mingus, 1979) is called «woo and illuminate», Court and Spark. What she did, with life and with art. Full stop. And (little) patience if several years ago Rolling Stone magazine made the clumsy and chauvinistic move of constructing a real diagram with Joni's many love stories in the musical world: if she had been a boy with a guitar she would have passed for a reckless and romantic heartthrob, but being a super intelligent, beautiful, blonde and talented woman brings you closer to the easy category of shamelessness and immorality. Even for a "rock" editorial team. Above all, it didn't go down (and it doesn't go down) that Joni, in her private life, did as she wanted, when she wanted, and because she thought it was right to do it, as it should be for every sentient being. Even for those who have a sliver of Joni Mitchell's talent.

They say about her

MARIA PIA DE VITO (vocalist and teacher)

Joni and the summer of '79: I remember, it was August, and I was in Ogliastro, Sardinia. For the first time on an independent trip, with a backpack and sleeping bag, I had joined friends who were camping freely in the pine forest on the coast. The place was enchanting. There was a clearing that bordered directly on the cliff, the sea within reach. During an afternoon of musical diatribes, a very nice friend told me "listen to this, I think you'll like it"; and he had slyly pressed a button on the "big radio" battery powered, with a compartment for the recorded cassettes that we carried everywhere. It was Joni Mitchell. I think the song was The Circle Game, which was followed by other wonders. (On one side of the cassette was Ladies of the Canyon, on the other Blue). I didn't leave the radio for hours, lying ecstatically listening, looking at the tops of the pine trees. What a blow! I couldn't believe my ears. She sang like a bird, played guitar and piano in a way never heard before. She spoke of intimate, difficult, sometimes controversial emotions, offered without false modesty. The voice was bright and effortless, the phrasing liquid and rhythmic, with implicit blues undertones. The stories, the speeches, which I still couldn't fully understand, dictated the phrasing, required breaks from the form, creating asymmetries, demanding gaps in time. And those high notes... But what struck me deeply was the sense of independence and individuality that emanated from her. What a dream, what envy for that freedom. Then I left again, alone. I didn't know it yet, but I was doing my Hejira. A journey that lasted 40 days, and touched Calabria, Sicily up to Levanto, in Liguria, and then Florence, Sanremo... then I returned to Naples. Many things happened. I can say with hindsight that that trip and that listening gave me the push to decide to make a living making music. I found Joni again after a couple of years. I studied and sang jazz, Sara Vaughan, Pat Metheny Group, Chick Corea, McLaughlin and Weather Report had passed through Naples, so I went crazy. Someone pointed out to me that Joni had come out with a tribute to Charles Mingus, a record with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Peter Erskine, Don Alias. I bought it in a rush. Hit number two, the definitive one. «Everything comes back!» I told myself. I understood the substance of that strength that I had felt from the first listen: Joni was an improviser, a poet, a composer, a painter, someone who was "at home" among the greatest living jazz musicians. The songs on the album (or "audio paintings", paintings to listen to, as she called them) were perfect stories, scenes and lightning phrases (God Must Be a Boogie Man!) painted with voice and words, with Pastorius' feverish basses, Hancock's clusters, Haiku solos or Shorter's sound flutters, as in a single stream of consciousness, a synaesthetic communication between geniuses. She became my muse.

DAVID CROSBY (rocker)

The old lion of the most dreamy and libertarian West Coast, who passed away in January this year, survived a youth that was dangerous to say the least due to too much love for psychotropic substances and, as an old man, Covid, had an intense relationship with Joni Mitchell. Not just sentimental: many artistic reasons, naturally, united the artistic paths of the two. One above all, the not at all conventional use of guitar techniques, closer to a certain jazz syntax than to the quiet arpeggio and "strumming" techniques used in rock. The mustachioed author of Guinnevere, moreover, was the producer of Joni Mitchell's first album, Song to a Seagull, released in the flamboyant 1968, a beautiful and intense creation, but still very much in the folk rock groove. They had started dating the year before. One evening the ingenious genius and the talented Mitchell were, with others, at dinner with a friend, and not just any one, Peter Tork, bassist of the Monkees, the "ghost" group made up more of actors than musicians who had a great outburst of notoriety at the end of the Sixties.

That evening Joni Mitchell publicly left David Crosby, and she did it in her own way: announcing to everyone that she would sing a song that would end up on her second album, Clouds, the song was That Song About the Midway. She did so while looking into Crosby's eyes, and to make sure the message had gotten through, she sang it to him a second time. Crosby said of Joni, regarding the difficulty of having her as a life partner: «Listen, imagine that you wrote a song, and you know that it's a really beautiful song. She comes home and you sing it to her. And then she takes the guitar and sings you three wonderful songs that she wrote in one go the previous evening." No hard feelings, however, in Crosby's words: «She's probably the best singer-songwriter of our times. I don't get along with her that well anymore, but I love her with all my heart for what she gave us."

In another statement: «Joni came to us, and she was rambunctious and exciting and funny, and we all loved her. I don't think she was that happy. She had had polio, an unhappy marriage with the birth of a daughter, and writing music was a way for her to work through crises and difficulties. It was difficult to be around her: she could make you cry and laugh in the space of half an hour. Bob Dylan is as good a poet as she is, but Joni is a far superior musician. Blue is an untouchable record, I don't think you can imagine a more perfect song than A Case of You. It put strain on all of us all, but it also gave us a reason to force ourselves to do things better."

PETE TOWNSHEND (guitarist and songwriter)

These days I constantly listen to a Joni Mitchell CD called Travelogue. It is a revisitation of her entire career with a full orchestra. As far as I'm concerned it's a sort of quantum masterpiece. Joni Mitchell is back at the height of her potential. And even her paintings and her pictorial activity seem to me to reveal her greatness in exploring herself. Some time ago, after The Who played Madison Square Garden in New York, someone told me that Joni has no plans to release any new records. If so, the record I speak of will stand as a testament not only to her work, but to the greatness of American orchestral music.

BARBARA RAIMONDI (vocalist and jazz teacher)

I discovered Joni Mitchell's music as a teenager with the album Blue, purchased at the time by my brother in the only record shop there was within a 30 km radius of our house; we had both just discovered Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the whole melodic and idealistic Californian West Coast music movement of the previous decade. It was the end of the seventies and I wanted to be like her, we all wanted to be like her. In the following years I continued to listen to her music, following and making my own her interest in jazz and I loved practically everything she wrote and recorded, so much so that I had a sort of awe in performing her songs. Her music is so connected with her personality that it makes it very difficult for another performer to work on her material: the philological cover makes no sense, in my opinion, and the revisitation risks adding nothing to something that was already perfect like this. Her ability to reconcile poetry and communication with interesting, complex melodies and harmonies, rich in inventiveness and originality, has a unique creative character; I believe that Joni Mitchell is, like Abbey Lincoln, Carla Bley, Carole King, an example of a female musician who was a great inspiration to all those of my generation, going beyond genres and labels. Personally, I believe it represented (and still represents) an ideal of expressive freedom that does not worry about falling into a specific category, but tries to tell a story that has, in itself, a universal communicative character. As a musician, I would like to think that I have come a little closer to this ideal.

GRAHAM NASH (rocker)

Joni and I were a couple for a couple of years, I saw her writing a lot of Blue's songs at home. The song River is the chronicle of the end of our story, and it saddened and exhilarated me at the same time, because it is a wonderful song and she had the courage to bare her soul. I consider that relationship a treasure. I remember walking away from home to give her space to finish My Old Man, which again concerns me. As the song says, I asked her to marry me, but I think she understood it as the request of someone who wanted the classic wife who cooks and looks after you, and this was not my intention. I wanted her to be free. Free to shine. Joni is a fascinating woman, and I am proud to have been a part of her life. In the next hundred years people will remember the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

GREGORY PORTER (jazz vocalist)

Part of Joni Mitchell's genius comes from the fact that you don't understand where it comes from. Consider River, the song, which I have heard during the holiday season. It begins with «They are cutting down the trees and placing the reindeer». Well, beyond the image, you gradually understand that she is frighteningly unhappy and that all she would like is a frozen river to skate on and chase away that fake happiness. There is a sophisticated melancholy in her writing, and so is he public image: there are very few photos in which she smiles. For me Joni is an artist who works on the thin border between happiness, sadness, love, hate, tranquility and nervous breakdowns: which is what we mostly experience.

ROSSANA CASALE (vocalist and teacher)

Casale also dedicated an album to Mitchell, simply titled Joni. This is how she spoke about it in a couple of recent interviews: «Joni was my first guide, my very first listen, together with the jazz records of my father, the American photographer Giac Casale. I locked myself in the living room and played her albums, I let myself be carried away by her lyrics. With Woodstock played on the piano, at the age of sixteen, I entered the Conservatory in Milan. She was my inspiration. In the same period in which I was recording Joni she reappeared like this, on stage, after twenty years. With a skill... she looked like an Indian chief driving that wonderful chariot. This coincidence struck me very much.

GUY GARVEY (rocker)

Between the ages of seventeen and thirty I wandered between parties in friends' houses, studio apartments, rooms found at the last moment, shared flats. Although I would never admit it, I was very often terrified. Joni was my big sister, my wise prop, my quirky auntie who understood things, and was always there to show me what a song written from the heart can do. The song Blue, which is the title of the album, has always come to my mind every time I have had regrets, that I have felt left aside, exhausted, scared. When she says the first words «Hey Blue, here's a song written for you» I understood that she was really worried about who would receive those words. And I made them mine.