Music Review | Tribute to Joni Mitchell
Songs Open to Interpretation Flaunt Their Staying Power
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By JON PARELES
Published: February 3, 2006
One way songs survive is to prove themselves adaptable: to become widely heard through endless rearrangements and multiple genres. Another way is to be just the opposite: so personalized and obstinate that every performance becomes one more imitation of the song's originator.
Joni Mitchell has written both kinds of song, to judge by a tribute concert on Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall. It was a benefit that raised $130,000 for the Music for Youth Foundation, which supports music education. Ms. Mitchell, who has post-polio syndrome, was not there; a statement from her said she was home with "a very sick cat that needs medicine twice a day." But her open-tuned guitar chords, her vocal slides and her vibrato were emulated by half of the 23 acts on the bill.
The concert only hinted at Ms. Mitchell's eclecticism. Representing jazz was the ballad singer Little Jimmy Scott, who performed the standard "At Last" — which Ms. Mitchell has recorded — as a series of short, stabbing, utterly dramatic outbursts. Most of the lineup featured singer-songwriters playing acoustic guitar or piano.
Dar Williams, Amy Grant, Shawn Colvin, Sonya Kitchell (backed by Assembly of Dust), Joanne Shenandoah, and even male performers including Martin Sexton, Marc Cohn, Jesse Malin and Mark Oliver Everett (leading Eels) stayed close to Ms. Mitchell's versions of the songs they chose. It was a measure not only of how inseparable Ms. Mitchell's songs are from her performances of them, but also of how many songwriters have modeled themselves on her since the 1960's.
On the surface, Ms. Mitchell's lyrics have the candor and detail of a diary; behind them is a meticulous organization of ideas and images. Her music has grown ever more idiosyncratic. She began her career with the simple folk harmonies and symmetrical melodies of songs like "Both Sides Now," but went on to incorporate jazz harmonies and the spontaneous rushes and pauses of conversation in her phrasing. What seems improvisational in the first verse is clearly a structure when it returns.
With songs from the 60's, the 70's and the 90's, the concert sketched Ms. Mitchell's trajectory. As a young woman, she made grand philosophical statements about life's cycles and paradoxes in songs like "Urge for Going" and "The Circle Game"; Tom Rush, an early advocate for Ms. Mitchell's songwriting, performed them both with reflective serenity.
"Both Sides Now" got two renditions. Laurie Anderson used pulsing electronic chords and plucked fiddle notes to make the song a solitary reflection on disillusionment; Judy Collins made it sweetly optimistic. Nellie McKay tried to remake "Chelsea Morning" with a hint of piano rumba; it resisted. And Richie Havens sang "Woodstock" as a quiet elegy for long-gone 1960's idealism.
Ms. Mitchell's 1970's songs grew more restless, more willful, and more innovative. She sang about a character — possibly herself — who was constantly in motion, traveling from place to place and man to man. The folky melodies gave way to mutable lines that were more naturalistic and more virtuosic.
Michelle Williams (from Destiny's Child) sang "Help Me," from 1974, following the melody's leaps and dips and swoons while using the breathy tone and self-congratulatory moves of current R&B, a fascinating mismatch. The Cowboy Junkies turned "River," from the 1971 album "Blue," into a rootsy torch song.
The Wood Brothers (Chris, from Medeski Martin & Wood, on bass with his brother Oliver on guitar and vocals) brought a bluesy openness to "Black Crow," from 1976, and Suzanne Vega, sounding closer to Ms. Mitchell, sang "Amelia" backed only by a bass, making it the song of a lone voyager. Neil Sedaka cheerfully linked "Raised on Robbery" back to piano-pounding 1950's rock.
By the 1990's, Ms. Mitchell's melodies were stretching toward jazzy recitative, as her lyrics confronted a world she found ever more merciless. Meshell Ndegeocello, playing bass accompanied by ghostly guitar and percussion, captured the desolate tension of "Cherokee Louise," about an abused teenager. And Bettye LaVette turned "Last Chance Lost," a terse and bitter breakup song, into an intense, wrenching soul lament that seemed to encompass a lifetime of disappointments. She made the song her own — no easy feat.
