Joni Mitchell teamed with Mingus before his death

by Bob Protzman
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
August 29, 1979

Joni Mitchell made it clear at first she considered her collaboration with the late Charles Mingus an odd combination.

The blending of Mitchell and Mingus, the jazz composer and bassist, produced a new album and led to her first tour in almost two years.

Consider: The 56-year-old Mingus, a street person and composer of such strongly flavored pieces as "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and "Better Git It in Your Soul," and of often-raucous, raging, cacophonous and innovative jazz, highly praised by musicians, but with only influential figures, meets the 35-year-old Mitchell, Canadian-born, upper-middle-class composer of such recently folkish "Both Sides Now" and of contemporary songs with often sophisticated, complex imagery and oblique thoughts, an untrained guitarist, schooled painter and poet generally considered the equal of Bob Dylan as a pop lyricist.

Between hunches of a grilled cheese sandwich and coleslaw at the Cleveland airport, Mitchell talked by phone recently about the new Mitchell collaboration and about the album "Mingus" that resulted on Asylum.

Mingus, the black jazz giant who died at the age of 56 Jan. 5 in Mexico of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, contacted Mitchell concerning the project about a year before his death.

WHY DID MINGUS single out Joni Mitchell, who is known primarily as a folk or rock artist? Why would he turn to her rather than to established or even younger jazz artists to work with him so late in his life?  

"He hadn't given up hope of living at that point, it was not necessarily that I was selected to write his epitaph," Mitchell said. "We all shared his optimism that he would beat it even though it was terminal. He had finished another album, 'Me Myself an Eye' (on Atlantic), and was looking for projects to busy himself with. The new album was to avoid the convalescence, not a general decline.

"Initially I felt his invitation was an odd alliance and I thought it was an odd combination, yet I was looking for a peculiar project. Deep in the back of my mind I was trying to study music (she does not read music), but not in an institution. This (Mingus' inquiry) came to me as a perfect gift, an opportunity to learn jazz with a master in a way that suited my learning process - by mudding through it."  

Although Mingus wanted her to work with him on a complex project involving a full orchestra, jazz vocalists and recitations by B.B. King, Mitchell declined, saying it simply was beyond her musical skills, and she "didn't want that Eliot's work." Some time later, however, Mingus got in touch with her again.

"Then he handed me six melodies and said, 'I want you to write lyrics to his satisfaction," she said, laughing. "And this from a man who punched out band members - on the bandstand. He was very charismatic, filled with them. It was a little joke between us that he wouldn't punch me."

Mitchell said that although Mingus was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, he was mentally alert. "His spirit was still vital and his extreme emotions and moods he'd always been known for.

"His humor was often radiant or like a storm cloud," she recalled. "But he had a great sense of humor, a sense of pathos. His spirit was not paralyzed. What were his objectives on the album?

"As I said, initially I didn't have a tribute in mind because he was very much present," she said. "I simply wanted to set words to his melodies that he could relate to, that had to do with him.

"'CHAIR IN THE SKY,' I written specifically to his point of view and with some of his humor. That was the first song that fell out of me. From that first full of mistakes. When he discovered I was musically illiterate, it only excited him. He cared for him. He was excited about it, though."

She said she wanted Mingus to like the album but also wanted to break down some of his prejudices.

"He was prejudiced against electric instruments. He felt the dynamics were lost with them and that it was their nature to take away the humanness of the player. Well, he had players (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius and others) were exceptions to that. And he ended up liking their music. You see, it was an exchange."  

Eventually Mingus, before his death, heard five of the album's six tracks, four of which were Mitchell's lyrics to Mingus' melodies. The other two songs had words and music by Mitchell - "God Must Be a Boogie Man" is the only one he didn't hear.

He liked everything except the "Boogie Man," which he found crude. He liked the demo tape, the purity of my first fledgling flight as a jazz singer. Mitchell said. "He liked 'Chair in the Sky.' The final version of 'Chair' was in his opinion, the only thing I over-wrote. He loved 'Pork Pie Hat.'"

Mitchell also included some documentary material, and the album took on more of a tribute quality.

"I had always shied away from consciously avoided producing what would be called a jazz album. In fact, she chose not to use versions of the Mingus tunes that were performed with such bebop and straight-ahead jazz players as alto saxophonist Phil Woods, trumpeter Harry Morgan, bassist Eddie Gomez and others.

"They were all successful versions in their own way," she said. "That's why I mentioned the musicians on the album. But they played traditional bebop, and I didn't want the album to be a retrogression.

"I wanted to create a record that without sacrificing any musical integrity within the jazz idiom, would be accessible to pop audiences but not by using any of the obvious fusion techniques.  

"I WANTED IT to be a purely jazz-oriented album, but I'm not a singing (jazz) idiom. I want to sound like a singer in the jazz idiom. I wanted to bring some freshness to the vocalizing of the great jazz and some to love their melodies more than the content of what they were singing."

A lot of them marvelously instrumentalists could just as well be singing off a tomato soup can unless a Billie Holiday or a Carmen McRae or a Hannah Banai, the lyrics always sounded profound.

Ms. Mitchell said that she learned a lot about jazz quickly, but that she also learned a lot about the various factions among jazz musicians and listeners.

"It was a great exercise," she said. "It really stretched my range and freed up my phrasing incredibly. I became more flexible in my opinions on how to phrase. I don't think I'd ever sung a song with quite so much movement as 'Pork Pie Hat,' probably one of the most comfortable songs in my show now. I just love to sing it."