Alternate Tunings

by John Ephland
Down Beat
December 1996

Their paths had never crossed.  One is from the cold and blustery fields of Alberta, Canada, the other straight out of Jason, Miss.  Joni Mitchell and Cassandra Wilson have more in common now that they've spent a long evening together, but their kinship, a musical bond thick as blood, has deep roots.

Mitchell's latest work involves drums-only accompaniment.  With her arsenal of created guitar timings, she and Brian Blade (That's right, Joshua Redman's drummer) have formed a music both spare and florid, improvisational even as it surrounds that inimitable voice, (Untitled at presstime, the album is scheduled for a February release date.)

Mitchell-whose last feature in these pages was a 1979 cover story on the occasion of her recorded collaboration with the late Charles Mingus - has been on a roll of late:  among other awards, two Grammys for last year's Turbulent Indigo; Billboard's Century Award, a new honor the newsweekly bestows on musician from all genres who've made a highly significant impact on the arts in this century, also in '95; and induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.  This fall sees the release of Hits and Misses, two career-spanning anthologies of her work with every label she's ever record for .  Having just turned 53, clearly, she has much to celebrate.

While Mitchell may have worked with Mingus, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Michael Brecker and - with the exception of one - all of Miles Davis' former mid-'60's sidemen, Wilson's jazz pedigree is better known to Down Beat readers.  Witness her recent wins, starting with last year's Readers Poll and continuing with both the Readers and Critics polls for top female jazz singer this.  Apart from her success with Blue Light 'Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, the 40-something singers recent work includes guest spots on Javon Jackson's A Look Within, David Sanchez's Street Scenes, guitarist Pat Martino's next record, a duet with Dianne Reeves on the Bob Belden produced Strawberry Fields, music for the soundtrack to the current film Rosewood, and recording and touring with Wynton Marsalis this winter as part of his ambitious Blood On The Fields project.

The musicians met in Los Angeles for dinner earlier this year at Adriano's, a fashionable Bel Air restaurant.  The conversation/interview, which spilled over to Wilson's hotel, dealt with the mechanics of music, definitions and the relevance of jazz, "that widened harmony," and Miles Davis.  Both women were earnest, robust and, at times, a tad wild, Mitchell taking the reins often in a conversation that jumped off the path more than a few times.

John Ephland: Both of you seem pretty restless when it comes to making music. What makes your music sound different?

Joni Mitchell:  What opened the door for me was that my left hand couldn't get at the chords that I heard in my head.  So I tuned the guitar to the chords that I heard in my head. (Folk musician) Eric Anderson showed me open G and D modal tuning.  After that, I never played in standard tuning.

Cassandra Wilson:  That's what I started out doing: playing guitar and singing Joni Mitchell songs.  But it was something I had stored away.

JM: What years?

CW: It was '74, '75, '76.

JM: And coffeehouses were still around?

CW: In Jackson, Mississippi, no less.  Check that out.  I figured out the tuning on (Mitchell's) "For The Roses," and that was it I was gone.  I was taken by the tunings.  There was Miles, I remember, when I was four or five; then when I got to be 15, there was Joni.  The tunings were the thing.  That's what opened up everything for me.

JM: It's that widened harmony that they create.

CW: There's a resonance.

JM: And even just simple bar chords.  You can make instant music with them all, with those really wide chords.  First of all, you can't get them on a guitar without the tuning.  It's physically impossible.  You widen the orchestral breadth of the instrument considerably.  You've dipped it down into the upper-bass range, for one thing.  You've got a lot more bottom on the music than the normal guitar.  And there are inversions that it couldn't have been possible to finger.

CW: Unless you have really beautiful, strong, wide hands, you can't get the same kind of resonance inside of a Spanish tuning.

JM: Because the strings are so tight.

CW: Once you find the place for it, the guitar speaks.  The only problem is my bass player complains.  Because when we do the open tunings, we're off into his space.  We overlap.

JM: Now, when I add bass, the bass player wants to go polka-dotting along on the bottom.  Especially in pop music.  He wants to come in and stay in.  I think, "Bump, bump, bump," kind of four-on-the-floor almost, only a little more creative, but not much.  So he's putting dark polka-dots across the whole thing.  So I'm saying to bass players, "Do you have to stay in all the time? Couldn't you go up in the mid-range and play a counter-melody?" ... There's a lot of quotes from Stravinsky in my music, if you listen.  From Rites of Spring.  It's a little jazzy, but it's not jazz.  It's jazzy in that the harmony is wider, but jazz has its own harmonic laws.

JE: You're breaking up stuff and you're making your own music.

JM: According to the guy who wrote a book on jazz, (multi-instrumentalist) Victor Feldman, he defined it and locked it into harmonic laws.  Victor Feldman apparently wrote a technical teaching book or some kind of book on jazz harmony (Musicians Guide To Chord Progression).  We were playing on a date.  What was it? "Moon At The Window."  Victor was playing vibes.  Well, on this one, he got really uptight.  I thought the words were bothering him because he's a family man and it was about people with the incapacity to love, and the had a very loving family.  I thought the words must be bothering him. I said, "Are the words bothering you?"  He said, "I hate the harmony and the harmonic movement."  I had to stop and send him home.  I said, "You can't play on something that you hate!"  I played the piece for Sarah Vaughan.  She had a comment on it:  "That's a strange form," she said to me.  I said, "It's not really a strange form, it's an old standard form.  It has a verse at the beginning that never comes back, then it's got A-B-C three-part melody like most standard do.  There's one chord that changes the interval as it goes into the C section that's a bit shocking.  I don't know what it is, whether it's a fourth or - I don't know technically what it is.  It comes in a little bit odd, but it's a good odd.  It's no odder than any change in life.  It's kind of like a "but."  The thing is drifting off ... "but."  That's how I think that chord works.  It sets up an alternative view point"

JE: So you were breaking the rules?

JM: I don't think there are any rules left to break.  But she thought so. Wayne Shorter came in, and he's the broadest musician that I've ever worked with.  He knows the numerical language, the alphabetical language, and the flyshit, yet he chooses to play through metaphor, as I do.  He's the only metaphor guy I know.

CW: Couldn't you find a classical musician that understands?

JM: I'm sure there would be somebody if you knew where to look; but a lot of times, classical musicians can't interpolate.  They've always had the guidelines someone else wrote.  It kind of kills their ability to improvise, in a lot of cases.  Not all.  But I think you have to grow up doing both.

JE: When you say "improvise," what does that mean?

JM:  Making it up (laughs), as opposed to reading it.

JE:  What do you think, Cassandra?

CW:  What's the Jazz Age?  What is improvisation?  What is jazz?

JM:  It's a fine line.

JE:  We seem to live in a time where there's a hardening of terms.

CW:  Yeah.  Because we've learned how to improvise.

JE:  That's interesting, Cassandra.  Have you been thinking about this long, that everything we do in America is jazz?  I mean, it swings, too.  Right? Excuse me for bringing up Wynton (Marsalis), but ...

CW:  While I eat?!

JE:  I find what both of you sing draws me in.  You each ask the listener to get closer as opposed to what belters do with their singing.

JM:  Belters tend to be showy, not intimate.  We can probably both belt, if you like that kind of theater.  I'm not sure that I do.  It's like grandstanding to me.  I said to Mingus, "Who's your favorite singer?" expecting Bessie (Smith) or Billie Holiday.  He said Judy Garland - a grander, showier kind of singing.  It's an interesting question.  We both could sing that way, I'm sure.

CW:  How do you get a voice like that?  And how are you able to maintain a voice like that?  How can you sing night after night after night at full broth and not rip your throat out?  I'm not into that.  I'm a Miles Davis child.

JM:  Miles is my favorite singer, and probably yours, too (laughs).  So tasteful.

CW:  The first Miles I heard was Sketches (Of Spain).  That was just so damn expansive.  I'm a Miles fan.  I love all of his work.  There's specific periods that I bond to.  It's nostalgia, though.  But I listen to it all.  I

love it all.

JM:  Miles was a fine, fine sonic innovator.  And some of the music of the bands he inspired, and kicked into gear, that's some of the finest music I've ever heard ... The later stuff I think he had less inspiration.  It took him longer to play.  It seems like he stood around more.  He was so pure.  He really waited until he heard something the he felt.

CW:  So much of it has to do with the emotions.

JM:  I'm at that place now, in a way.  I'm almost too picky to go on.  I'm still making the music, and I've got some new ideas.  But you get narrower, in a way.  It takes more and more to get you off.  Mingus, at the end, couldn't stand anything except a couple of Charlie Parker records.  He couldn't stand his own music.  He'd go, "He's falsifying his emotion.  That ain't shit."  He heard all the effort people put forth and very little purity and sincerity.  I get that way sometimes.  My jive detector gets too sensitive and music just

sounds awful to me.  All of it ... In a certain way, we do most of our enthusiastic listening in our youth.  It's the back-drop for our courtships, and you stow it and you're sentimental.  The songs with the Pioneers, Roy

Rogers' backup band, I'm just thrilled listening to those old songs.  That's the music of my pre-teens.  It's much better music than I realized as a child. Sentimental, kind of cornball, classic cowboy stuff.  I never was much of a country & western fan, but I love listening to that.  It swings.  It's got that element of jazz in it.

JE:  And their hearts are in it so much.

JM:  And every track is excellent.

CW:  Like Turbulent Indigo.  I heard it the other night.  The song is, "You've made everything I fear and everything I ... ."  There's this passage or this space where there are two bars and it's a repeating thing.  For me, it's the epitome of the economy of motion.  Two changes that just tear everything up. Tears everybody up.  And it's only the space of two bars.  It's in the middle of it and comes out of nowhere.  It's like harmonically, how does this fit in here?  Where does it come from?

JM:  Weird things.  It comes out of the tunings.

CW:  I know.  That's you.  And I'm always prepared for it.  But this one, I wasn't prepared for it because it's so spare.  It's only two bars.

JM:  Or Miles plays this flat note on the end of "It Never Entered My Mind." This is a really early recording.  He draws this note flat, and he holds it flat all the way out.  If he played it in pitch, it wouldn't do this to you, what it does.  It's the saddest note.

CW:  It's not a flatted fifth, is it? (laughs)

JM:  No!  It's a flatted flat!  Know what I mean?  It is FLAT!  It's like, out of tune.  but if he played it in tune, it wouldn't have the impact.  It's the saddest note in the world.  It's like he just lost it on this note.  Sometimes I go through these periods where I get temporary perfect pitch and everything is driving me nuts!  I go and put that thing on.

CW:  That's why you had to find those guitars.  Because of the tunings.  I deal with maybe two or three tunings.  I can't imagine what you have to deal with because I know you must have hundreds of them.

JM:  I have 60.  But that's too many. Now we're in the lounge of the Hotel Nikko.  The bar band starts their set playing Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight."

JM: (to Cassandra) What do you think about Monk?  You're also a piano player. Does he have an influence on you?

CW:  Definitely.  Monk is the main influence.  I took classical piano lessons for seven years, so that was my first introduction to music formally.  But Monk, Monk's Dreams - that album was one of the first albums, along with Sketches Of Spain, that I heard as a kid.  When I stared playing piano, those were the first piano sounds I heard.  Later came the classical things: Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Ravel, that whole piano tradition out of Europe.  The first sounds I heard from the piano were this weird kind of (makes 'tink tink tink tink' sounds).  That's the way I play piano now.  Economy playing.

JM:  I just discovered Monk two nights ago.  I knew that name.  I heard all kinds of stories, like, "Monk could paint!  He painted a bowl of flowers and an ax!"  But I never really knew what he was about.  Monk hasn't worked his influence on me, but he's going to.  the first thing that caught my eye was that he played flat-fingered like Laura Nyro, instead of with an arch, which is hard, I think, for going fast.  Then, of course, the obvious, which everybody notes, is how he's always working from the top down and cross-handing.  But the thing that really amazed me is the economy, the minimalism of it.  How beautiful it was!  I'm a chord-puller.  I like hybrid colors, like triads or full-fisted chords.

JE:  I can tell by the way you play your guitar that you do that.

JM:  But this guy is linear and very percussive.  On the left hand, he may be pulling totally tonal chords, or sometimes just rocking from the black to the white to the black to the white keys.  Very, very minimal, but god!  When it fibers in with the other players, a lot of times, if the piano player has a lot of chops - this has been my experience in hiring piano players for my band - they get really pianissimo on you and they start scribbling over all these intricate things and they take up a lot of space and they over-embellish.

CW:  That's why I don't have a piano player.

JM:  It's hard to find a minimalist.

CW:  They figure: "OK - 88 keys?  I've got to play every one of them.  12 notes?  I've got to play every note."  And it's the instrument itself, you can't really blame them.  Unless you really have the serious discipline and you can focus on bringing the piano into a small space, condensing it, it's hard to do that.  I think it's hard for a lot of pianists.  Now the old cats, who used to comp with the singers, understood how to do that.  A lot of space.

JM:  Leaving the vocalist room to breathe.

CW:  And for the imagination.

JM:  Miles, too.  He was Mr. Economy.  If you don't feel anything, don't play it.

JE:  The two of you are band players as well as vocalist.  but you also imply-Cassandra, you do it more than Joni - the use of space.  You both imply a lot, and I sense you don't feel like you have to say everything and put everything out there.  You leave stuff out so people can fill it in for themselves.

JM:  Speaking more for Cassandra, because of my wordiness, I am first responsible to my words.  So when I play with a band, I have to be the leader. Well, the words have to be the leader.  And if there's any room for anyone to get in, well, good luck!  We did a jam one time, and it was ridiculous.  It was Herbie Hancock's pilot for a series.  Two drummers:  Vinnie Colaiuta and I forget the other one; two horn players, Wayne Shorter and David Sanborn; Bobby McFerrin and myself.  And we're doing "Hejira" and "Furry Sings The Blues." Now, those are two very moody songs.  You got all these guys waiting to get in the gaps.  Two horn players and a scat singer, so to speak - that is to say, a wordless singer - waiting for a hole to open up for them to get an "ooh aah" out.  there's hardly any.  a lot of people who heard it thought it was successful.  I wish sometimes I could write a song with less story.  Let me try it: "The wind, the wind, oh the lovely wind. La la."  (laughs) You can take a lot of space between those and then give them eight bars to blow around!

CW:  There's something about your phrasing that implies space.  It's the most unique phrasing.  When I first heard the way that you would say all the things you would say, and when try to do that.  I would try to write poetry and sing it and I would just sort of - I couldn't get it all in!  that's a special art. Not everybody has that.

JE:  This is one of the reasons we got you two together - we kind of saw Cassandra coming from more of a jazz-oriented background and going toward pop music, however savage a description that is.

CW:  Dangerous.  Dangerous.

JM:  Cassandra, forgive me, but from the little I know, that doesn't sound quite accurate.  She's got a classical piano background, she's listening to jazz as a young person, but she's also a singer of folk music.  Right?

CW:  What do you call all that?

JM:  That's just good American fun!  (laughs) I don't think we're coming from anything that radically different.  I'm coming first from classical music, a couple years of piano where they crack you at the knuckles.  I could memorize faster than I could read.  I was not going to be literate, apparently.  Well, as it turned out, I didn't need to.  There were rare occasions that I did, but I just needed an interpreter.  You hire a guy to write the lead sheets out. Then you're home free.  It's an important thing.  I mean, I wish I had it.

CW:  Well, it's important to have the tools to communicate.  Especially in the jazz world.  If you don't have those tools, there's no respect there, on a certain level.  I treasure both of them now.  I'm glad to have it all, but I think there's a certain kind of opening you get when you approach your instrument intuitively.  The trade-off is, because you don't know the rules, you can open doors, open windows.  That's what the tunings were for me.  It was like a way out.  When I first tapped back into it, it was like, whew!

JM:  It's a tool for discovery.  That's the great thing about it.  It's like a no-man's land.  It's uncharted territory.

JE:  You could say you both haven't gone from point A to point B.  Instead, you've always been where you are all along.

CW:  We are all complete.  I like that.