How'm I Ever Gonna Know My Home?

Or, The Ballad of Joni and Jaco

There is nothing inside the six discs of Archive Volume 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980) that’s likely to change the casual listener’s perception of Joni Mitchell.

But there are plenty of examples of Mitchell changing or challenging the perceptions — her own and those held by others — of what a song can be. What sounds it wants, in what ratios. The size and shape of its canvas. The stories that are explicitly told in words and the stories that are discreetly withheld.

There’s Joni alone at the piano. Rolling through stately chordal canyons far less literal than the ones we know from Laurel Canyon. Maybe it’s noodling, maybe it’s just eavesdropping as she tests out textures; the 12-minute spontaneous inquiry, marked by producer Henry Lewy as “Save Magic,” becomes the seed of Mitchell’s “Paprika Plains.”

There’s Joni during the time she’s collaborating with bassist and composer Charles Mingus. She writes characters that can slide into his ethos, changes what they say from version to version, sharpening the portraits. At first she follows Mingus’ ideas about the musicians who should be involved; we hear the esteemed jazz people (bassist Eddie Gomez, saxophonist Phil Woods,  keyboardist Jan Hammer) dutifully bringing the expected jazzlike auras.

Nothing wrong with this. There’s also nothing levitational about it – and coming as it did after the airborne Hejira, the early Mingus tracks feel timid. Jaco Pastorius, the bassist who played a huge role in keeping Hejira aloft, apparently told Mitchell this.  “Like, Jaco said to me, “What are you playing that tired old shit for? You’re more innovative than that,” Mitchell recalls in the fascinating interview with Cameron Crowe that’s part of the Archive package. “And I agreed. I didn’t wanna play meat and potatoes jazz. I wanna come into the jazz world as an innovator. And I couldn’t do it with the players that he (Mingus) chose for me. But I knew I could do it with Jaco and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.”

Mitchell’s work in this period shows us the many routes that a profound type of artistic restlessness can take. On song after song she is actively loosening the mooring knot of structure – seeking something fluid and evanescent, resisting rigidity in all its confining forms. She’s like that Coyote, or that pilot in the early days of flight – racing away, blurry and unknowable, out of reach. She describes scenes and places while at the same time covering her tracks, leaving clues in a kind of code, celebrating the sense of relentless motion while obscuring the location on the map. I know what it sounds like, but where, exactly, is “Dreamland”?

The fixed declarations of Blue are a long ways away from these travelogues. These songs describe transit not simply in words but by actually flying – the verses are set to windswept suspended chords, the choruses rarely wallow in the happy calm of resolution. Even the deliberative songs are fidgety, with an eye on the door. The emotional tone starts with Mitchell, that wily master of the wild impulsive vocal leap, but on each of these projects it is expanded by her collaborators.

Jaco most crucially.

Do you need proof of how thoroughly intertwined Mitchell’s songs are with Pastorius’ impossibly fluid fretless electric bass? Cue up track 2 on disc 3, a set of solo demos Mitchell made at A&M Studios in Los Angeles. After the opaque opening line of the song then titled “Traveling” that became “Hejira” – “I’m traveling in some vehicle” – there is foursquare rhythm guitar comping. Totally ordinary. Then find a version with Jaco – the one on Hejira, or disc 6 of the Archives has a spirited one, recorded at a stop in Forest Hills, New York on the 1979 tour that gave us the transcendent live set Shadows and Light. His four-note ascending “answer” to that lyric (which happens on the second verse of the studio version) is so clear it is forever embedded in the song.

There are countless examples of this type of vocal-instrumental volleying, moments when Pastorius responds to a phrase with burbling space-age bebop or some ringing and impossibly beautiful high harmonic chording that releases both the words and the music into the stratosphere. I’d argue that it’s a crucial part of the oxygen – or, more accurately, the wind – running through Mitchell’s songs of this era.

Because Mitchell is seeking a musical conveyance for that feeling of everything being up in the air. She’s chasing a language of the unresolved, suspended between land and water, the emotional cloud she can’t shake as she goes from taxi to pontoon boat to train. Mitchell seems to have intuited that she couldn’t just tell stories of dislocation; she needed to embed the feeling of drift, of needing change on a cellular level, into the music to create a sensory experience. It’s in the wind-twisted curls of the melodies and the chording patterns and the languid high-arching melodies from Jaco.

Archives Volume 4 offers a step-by-step accounting of how this wild delicate sound evolved. The Jaco subplot is the one that hit me the hardest, perhaps because it’s alive with classic archetypes of creative collision: There’s Mitchell the wary watcher, unspooling icepick lyrics with deliberate emphasis, in exact rhythm. Someplace further back there’s Pastorius, he of the sound like an enveloping hug, scampering and wobbling, holding things together down low while commenting, elegantly, on the proceedings up high.

We should recognize this restlessness. It’s built into Internet life, confronts us every time we emphatically change the channel. We know there is no escape from the fitful browse: The new distraction is just another literal concretized pop culture narrative. The choice is from puppies to rainbows. Look how they gleam and maybe you won’t notice the gnawing existential turmoil that’s going on, unspoken, behind the curtain.

When the focus is totally on the primary colors on the screen, we lose the chance to engage the shadows or the flickering light. To wonder and imagine possible alternate scenarios. The entertainments of our moment are fantastical and also reassuringly fixed; they follow the dazzling script and don’t stick around for questions. Mitchell and the musicians in her orbit her did the opposite. They chased down the shades and implications of meaning, catching and releasing each before drawing conclusions. And, all the while, they asked questions — about the primal overriding need to escape, about what the lunge feels like in mid-flight, about the soul work that only seems to start when we slam the door and put the foot on the gas.