Joni Mitchell and the guitar that traveled

Joni’s music is one of stylistic turns, but her acoustic guitar playing reveals an affection for jazz even in her earliest works.

by Cassidy Sollazzo
AV Club
January 29, 2026

To be fully transparent, this was initially going to be a very different essay. I first set out to chronicle Joni Mitchell's transformation from a folk visionary to a jazz voyager; a story of invention to instruction. How she developed her own approach to the guitar, but somewhere along the way - somewhere around the mid-'70s, in the midst of her journey into jazz - she began to learn more than she created. The exact words I used in my pitch to Matt and Casey were "Joni Mitchell as guitar's most important revolutionary turned most dedicated student." It's not that that's an entirely incorrect read; she definitely learned something from her jazz collaborators, but Jaco Pastorius, Larry Carlton, and Charles Mingus didn't really teach her anything new about the guitar, specifically. There were no lessons; there was no starting from scratch. Instead, they helped take her sound further than she ever could've with only her acoustic, her dulcimer, and an occasional rock collaborator.

So while I'd originally intended to tell a story of stylistic migration - from folk ingénue to jazz intellectual - the deeper I looked into her chord structures, tunings, and top-to-bottom compositions, the clearer it became that Mitchell has always handled her guitar like a jazz instrument. Her folk and folk-rock associations, rather than being the roots of her artistry, were more born out of necessity - coming up in the coffee shops-turned-Laurel Canyon scene was more conducive to Joni-and-guitar than full ensemble. Mitchell approached her music, and the guitar specifically, with a jazz-informed perspective that defined her songs from the outset. Her collaborations with jazz figureheads and improv-based session musicians didn't provide an "education" so much as a vessel through which to get her songs to their maximum potential.

Long before she forayed into her funkier circles, Mitchell's guitar was already doing what jazz ensembles do. She treats her guitar like a piano - or even a whole band - with bass, harmony, and melody all happening simultaneously. Her vision for the guitar consistently exceeded what the instrument was designed to hold, pushing it beyond mechanical boundaries and physical limits in service of orchestration (Mitchell's website recommends you opt for a guitar with a "very firm neck" and custom string sets, "if you have to").

The basic story is more or less known: Mitchell's core technique (a creative left-hand, a defiance to standard tuning) was born out of physical constraints she contracted during a bout of polio before she turned ten. She got crafty with her tunings to cheat the standard system and compensate for her weakened grip. That, combined with her adaptation of Elizabeth Cotten's fingerpicking style, has led to a technique that millions of guitarists, scholars, and music theorists go to great lengths to decipher - because, bafflingly, it creates the illusion that the instrument is doing multiple jobs at once.

Mitchell's official website includes not only a "Tips for Playing Joni" section but also breakdowns of tuning patterns and community-contributed guitar tablatures, complete with author notes and specifications. (Rebecca Payne and David Beale's "That Song About Midway" transcription includes the disclaimer: "We're convinced this is an extremely close rendition of the real thing. If the tab appears a bit confusing at first, it helps to get the pattern of the bass notes into your head."). Much of the work done on her archive is people finding new workarounds to match her idiosyncratic structures.

Early blues guitarists like Robert Johnson and classic rock contemporaries like Neil Young and Keith Richards all opted for open tunings, but what became Mitchell's constant was her lack of stasis. She was endlessly turning her pegs, often without a specific note in mind, opening up new melodic terrain and building tunings off instinct. That became the source of much of her intrigue. Mitchell's guitar becomes unfixed, with her tunings forcing independent bass motion and inner voices within her playing.

All in all, there are upwards of 50 unique tunings in Mitchell's repertoire. Music theorists and scholars Megan Lyons and Peter Kaminsky created an integrated network of Mitchell's early guitar-based music. The three points of the triangle ("Chords of Inquiry," Affordance, and Expressive Opposition) represent how her harmonies, tunings and chord shapes, and structural and poetic contexts inform her near-inimitable style. One of her earliest originals, "Urge for Going," showcases her tangled high-fret arpeggios, made whole and rich with a subtle bass tone from the bottom string. She strikes the chords with intensity, while keeping the circling high-pitched notes on top - like a guitar duet, but a solo. This kind of internal layering was already embedded in her earliest performances, standard fare in her Canadian coffeeshop repertoire. On Song of a Seagull's "I Had A King," the middle two strings are tuned in unison, adding a second layer of resonance and an inherent refusal to resolve, matching that unsettling feeling that comes with the hook "I can't go back there anymore."

You can see how, throughout her discography, Mitchell started to get an itch to incorporate instruments into her arrangements. That impulse first appears mechanically. She recorded a demo of the dissonant, chilling "Roses Blue" from Clouds with a peacock harp overdub, which makes the song's dread feel even more ominous. This version is tuned a few notes down from the original, and the harp adds embedded octaves that ring slightly sharp alongside the track's droning open strings. It's a flash of Mitchell chasing a rhythmic or harmonic tool that the final track goes on to replace with a higher open G tuning, constant chord stacking and mutating, and ringing, tinny strums that enter on the final verse. The guitar ultimately absorbs what the added instrument gestures toward.

Later, on Blue, Mitchell brings in the dulcimer, introduced to her by a wayward craftsman at a late-'60s Big Sur Folk Festival. The zither then becomes a transitional tool, adding a more percussive element of open-string resonance to her sound, reinforcing her tuning logic. Tracks like "California" and "A Case of You" were made complete with her slap-strums and stacked strumming. Mitchell expands her sonic vocabulary while deepening her relationship to the acoustic space, all without relinquishing the guitar's organizing role.

From the Roses is where Mitchell's jazz curiosity really starts to take shape, while still tentatively grounded in her Clouds-era dissonance and steadily folk-rock environment. Until then, the personnel across Mitchell's discography were a combination of rock session musicians and folk cameos. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were frequenters across Ladies of the Canyon and Blue, alongside James Taylor, and they were all repeat offenders in the For the Roses sessions. But she was searching for bigger sounds, and the demos show the depth of her early-'70s experimentation: she recorded an early blues-funk interpretation of the single "You Turn Me On (I'm A Radio)" with Neil Young & The Stray Gators, which is heavy on the twang and the slow-fast-slow back-and-forth, and she cut demos of the title track with David Crosby and Graham Nash, the folk-rock scene still ever-present in her processes, though starting to wane.

Mitchell notably fled to British Columbia's Sunshine Coast before writing For the Roses, and I think that separation from the almost incestuous Laurel Canyon scene allowed her to shed any expectations or outside pressure. Her music grew more elaborate as a result of her allowing it a chance to breathe. She'd added flute, saxophone, oboe, piano, strings, auxiliary percussion, and even electric guitar on the final LP to support structures built out from her acoustic guitar alone. Tracks like the orchestral "Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig's Tune)" or the sauntering, woodwind-heavy "Barangrill" prove this further, like moments where Mitchell warily dipped her toe into multi-instrumentation to give her songs the layered, more resonant qualities she'd been getting out of just her guitar on previous records. The album serves as a hinge between folk intimacy and jazz complexity, translating guitar construction into ensemble movement.

For the Roses also brought Tom Scott into Mitchell's discography, the woodwind player who would have a lasting impact on her continued jazz realignment. His melodic phrasings bolstered Mitchell's looser, rhythmic acoustic guitar in ways, say, an occasional Stephen Stills bass credit wasn't (see the slippery "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," Scott's saxophone flourishing between Mitchell's ringing chords). Scott introduced Mitchell to his backing band, the LA Express, which was, as biographer David Yaffe put it, "severing what was left of her folk ties, mostly, for good."

She was immediately taken by drummer John Guerin, who, in turn, agreed that jazz musicians were exactly what Mitchell was missing. He specifically told the Cincinnati Post in 1976 that she "needed the broad musical background" to fully realize her complex, layered, intricately polyphonic arrangements - arrangements that she'd already built within a single instrument. Here was recognition of her internal complexity: her key changes, oft-debated time signatures, and reliance on tunings rather than left-hand dexterity befuddled even the most seasoned session rockers. Mitchell's guitar was already operating beyond folk conventions, and jazz musicians were the first to recognize the rhythmic and tonal logic she was working within.

COURT AND SPARK WAS LIKE ARRIVING at the other side of the For the Roses bridge, looking back at Blue from across the water. Mitchell's voicings and stacked chords (the basis of her harmonic logic, formed entirely on the guitar) come to dictate the horn lines, bass movements, and rhythmic accents that end up in the final recording. The guitar arrangements themselves, "Joni's weird chords," as she referred to them, create the foundation for what becomes an improvisational playground met with musicians who actually know what to do with it and how to make the most of it. The guitar remains the song's structural engine, whether or not it's in the foreground. Playing in the ensemble allowed Mitchell to maintain the rhythmic framework while the rest of the band externalized the work her guitar once carried alone.

The LA Express toured with Mitchell in 1974, and recordings from that tour would become the live album Miles of Aisles. Her tunings were so twisty and complex that re-rehearsals were necessary even after two weeks off. The resulting album is evidence of the creative swings Mitchell took on this tour, of the looseness with which she approached her songs, and of her continued pull toward the jazzy side of rock. "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Carey" get electrified makeovers, the former with slide guitar and a sense of urgency, the latter with almost surf-rock guitar tones. It feels like a moment where some of her earliest songs are getting the big-band treatment she'd always had in mind for them. Ladies of the Canyon track "Rainy Night House," originally performed on piano, is reinterpreted into a smooth arrangement with subdued electric guitar passages that weave between Mitchell's warm vocals. The arrangement, and the rest of the set itself, moves with the looseness of a jazz club, far removed from the confessional folk soapbox of her earliest performances.

During the second half of the '70s, Mitchell's sound continued to expand, further utilizing the session musicians at her disposal, while keeping the guitar as her central chordal anchor. She dove more explicitly into jazz on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, continuing to tweak and reimagine her songs in a live setting, demonstrating their ever-malleable nature. Summer Lawns track "Edith and the Kingpin" took on a new life on stage. She's flaunted moments of thumping disco (Live at Forest Hills, 1979), but has also performed it acoustic-only, the guitar patterns mimicking what the flutes and keys do in the album cut (Live at Harvard Square, 1979). It's the opposite of what most of the Miles of Aisles tracklist consists of, which is electrified versions of originally acoustic tracks. Reversing it here showed that Mitchell didn't necessarily need the musicians she continued to add to her band. If she wanted to, or if she had to, she could do it all on one instrument, because the guitar already contained the entire arrangement.

Mitchell began the '80s with her second live album, Shadows and Light, recorded at the Santa Barbara Bowl at the end of '79. The jump from Miles to Shadows is more dramatic than you'd think; the first disc is pretty much 40 minutes of pure jazz (down to Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"), and the second act doesn't let up, either. Her sound expanded even further, demonstrating how her guitar language endured amplification and saturation. We get a ripping "Black Crow" (howling vocals, horns and sax, endless syncopation, a shuffling backbeat) that's brighter than the Hejira version. We get a warbly, reverbed "Furry Sings the Blues," electric guitar ebbing and flowing between her rhythmic chords and the slinky, feathered percussion. The album flaunts Mitchell's guitar operating at full bandwidth.

In the time between Summer Lawns and Shadows and Light, Mitchell had made a de facto turn into full-blown jazz with Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus. The latter, especially, is her most concerted jazz effort, consisting mostly of Charles Mingus's own compositions that she added her lyrics to. It seemed jarring, especially coming just five years after Court and Spark and all of its pop-centric, chart-topping, mainstream success. But it wasn't actually that stark. Mitchell was just being more straightforward about her jazz-ness.

In Ariel Swartley's review of Mingus for Rolling Stone, she refers to Mitchell as "the babe in bopperland, the novice at the slot machines, the tourist, the hitcher. She's someone who has to ask." That thinking is how I originally approached this whole endeavor, albeit with less malice and internalized misogyny. But I was of the idea that Mitchell found herself in these spaces out of curiosity rather than innate alignment. What was really happening on Mingus was that the jazz aficionado had stepped out from behind the Lady of the Canyon's shadow. And that very well could be why that record, and what followed into the '80s, didn't land as hard for her widest net of listeners; it wasn't jazz music in folk packaging. Jazz took up the whole room, garnished with a speck of rock and a dusting of folk.

Mitchell was only going to keep getting closer to jazz until she was covering Charles Mingus himself. She'd always wanted deep, massive sounds - sounds that she was always able to create on her acoustic by virtue of her inimitable technique and the wholly singular way she looked at the instrument itself. What appeared to be a pivot from form was actually a step toward a truer, more fully realized sound.