Joni Mitchell Mingus, Asylum 5E-505
Joni Mitchell, guitar & vocals; Jaco Pastorius, bass guitar; Wayne Shorter. soprano sax; Herbie Hancock, electric. piano; Peter Erskine, drums; Don Alias congas; Emil Richards, percussion: Wolves, background vocals.

The qualities we would associate with Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell are present only by inference on Mingus. Mingus was thinking more like a collaborator than a leader. Mitchell also had never taken a collaborator before, and she was obviously honored and humbled to work with the legendary bassist- composer. This degree of respect and homage is evident throughout Mingus. Her paintings point to a master- apprentice, father- daughter relationship; she depicts Mingus as a Zeus- like figure glaring down from the clouds and as a warn, cuddly, teddybear ( which is slightly misleading - Mingus was a grizzly bear not averse to expressions of rage and violence). But there is a sense of pain and striving to Mingus as if Mitchell knew that she wasn't quite able to realize the grand expectations of their project.

On the musical level, Joni Mitchell presented Mingus with a conceptual challenge. Her music had originally been built on a pedal- point - those droning, raga-ish guitar chords - over which she'd modulate in a conversational vibrato. Since Court and Spark Mitchell has pursued a jazz direction, her vibrato becoming less pronounced. The spacious melodies that Mingus wrote for Mitchell challenge her to modulate in a more scalar, linear manner, to make greater use of dynamics, and to evolve a floating, more spontaneous style of phrasing. Mitchell, for he part, was concerned with finding a comfortable vehicle for their collaborations ("My version of jazz" as she put it in Rolling Stone), and she disposed of earlier sessions before finally teaming up with Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Peter Erskine.

As a result, the music doesn't work as a Mingus album or a Mitchell album, but sounds more like Weather Report with a vocalist. Like those of early Weather Report ("Waterfall" and "Tears"), the harmonies and melodies are interchangeable; washes of electric piano, globular soprano saxophone obligatos, conversational electric bass, and a rotating percussive backbeat alternate as the main focus or combine into one elongated group melody. Mitchell's rhythm section is cannily protective and understated on the atmospheric ballads ("A Chair in the Sky," " Sweet Sucker Dance," and "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"), particularly bassist Pastorius who provides a constant stream of counterpoint (sometimes suggesting a funkified version of Mingus's characteristic rhythms of six against four), and covers up for Mitchell's lapses of time and pitch. Mitchell sings with a mentholated lyricism, strolling way behind the beat, then swelling and purring in a manner that indicates close scrutiny of Miles Davis (like the long cry that precedes the final chorus in "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"); and though she can't touch their vocal virtuosity, at several moments she suggests the slurring quality of Betty Carter and the octave dips of Sarah Vaughn. Mitchell seems most comfortable on "The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines," a punchy, brass- inflected chart; Mingus's blues melodies elicit bold elliptical leaps from her voice and force her to dig in hard rhythmically.

"Maybe I've never really loved/I guess that is the truth/I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes/And looking down on everything," Mitchell once sang. Moving from seduction to seduction, relationship to relationship, Mitchell would detail her own experiences and impressions, keeping her freedom to act as an observer. Thrust from first person narratives to third person panegyrics, and compelled to follow the contours of Mingus's melodies and rhythms, Mitchell's lyrics are far from profound. "Sweet Sucker Dance" reveals something of the tension Mitchell felt in working with Mingus; "A Chair in the Sky" is an empathetic portrait of Mingus's final days; and their brief vocal duet on "I's a Muggin'" is a snippet of what might have been. But she tends to idealize Mingus, who was a compulsive, explosive personality - anyone who had followed Mingus over a long period of time would've witnessed incidents on the bandstand that preclude romanticizing him. Mingus was a giant, warts and all. He never did anything halfway - if he made a fool of himself, he made a damned fool of himself. In other words, Mitchell doesn't deal with the dark side of Mingus's nature, and her perceptions of him (and jazz) on "God Must Be a Boogie Man" and "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" are epitomized by her affected pronunciation of 'music maaan' on the later (shades of 'jewellllls' on "For Free"). The tolling chorus of wolves on Mitchell's dirge "The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey," with its imagery of life as a storm without moral judgments and justice, comes closest to evoking a real sense of loss, more so than the intrusive tape excerpts of Mingus's voice.

How well Mitchell's over sentimentalized but sincere efforts will appeal to her audience, or Mingus's, I can't guess, and I'm not placing any bets on how well, if at all, she'll be able to carry it off in concert. Yet the fact that Mingus is closer to Weather Report than to Mitchell or Mingus, and that some of it is a failure doesn't really matter. What's important here is that Mitchell has put her reputation on the line to bring a sense of Mingus to a larger audience, and has disregarded safe formulas in favor of artistic growth. I suspect that Mingus must be pleased by the nerve that Joni Mitchell has shown in swimming the currents of his thought before she could even tread water.