THE WAYBACK: A Live Album Like No Other
JONI MITCHELL
Joni Mitchell with astonishing band, reinventing singer-songwriter music
JONI MITCHELL
Shadows and Light
Asylum (Recorded September 1979)
When the category is Great Live Albums, the usual suspects are the barnstorming rock bands (Lynyrd Skynryd’s One More From the Road) or the super-brainy progressive acts (Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Welcome Back My Friends….).
Notice that these are bands. We don’t typically expect tenderhearted singer-songwriters to create live experiences that radically expand upon their studio recordings — after all, their stock in trade is the confluence of music and poetry, and usually the music part needs to be locked down for the words to flourish. That’s one reason Joni Mitchell’s Shadows and Light is a landmark: It shows what can happen when a poet beloved for clarity and exactitude develops a more open, elastic instrumental context for her songs.
Mitchell had already been moving in this direction: Hejira, which featured the fretless bass phenom Jaco Pastorius, situated her stream-of-consciousness meditations against vast, prairie-like expanses, and Mingus, the studio album corresponding to this tour, brokered a truce between her cadences and the hipster linguistics of jazz. Having abandoned the guitar-strum backing strategy employed by so many singer-songwriters around the time of her breakthrough Blue, Mitchell was emphasizing open space over dense torrents of information, thinking in terms of dazzling washes of color, moments of pensive silence, surging multi-ethnic polyrhythms.
On Shadows and Light, Mitchell and her accomplices — bassist Pastorius, guitarist Pat Metheny and keyboardist Lyle Mays, saxophonist Michael Brecker, percussionist Don Alias and doowop legends the Persuasions — chase the material from Mingus, Hejira and earlier albums into a liquid impressionistic realm that has no parallel in popular music. They transform songs that once travelled at a steady clip into lush free-floating creations. They emphasize atmosphere, often focusing on slight fleeting moments like Pastorius’ weeping, rhapsodic countermelodies on “Coyote.”
And rather than treat the songs as fixed texts, they approach them as outlines, springboards for deft and gentle elaboration. Mitchell thrives in this context — for proof, check her smiling and irreverent vocals on “Dreamland,” or the way she settles into the shimmering guitar sustains of “Amelia.”
It’s easy to understand why Mitchell was comfortable: She’d assembled an amazing set of musicians who, to an individual, were at the peak of their creative powers. Together, they created something more than just boilerplate accompaniment — they created vast and thrillingly new atmospheres for Joni Mitchell songs. Have this on standby for those (alas inevitable) times when the efforts of singer-songwriters begin to sound straightjacketed. It’s a potent live-in-the-moment reminder that there are always other paths available.
KEY TRACKS: “Coyote,” “Edith and the Kingpin,” “Hejira.”
BY THE SAME ARTIST: Wild Things Run Fast
AROUND THE SAME TIME: Neil Young: Live Rust.
INFLUENCED: The Story: Angel in the House; Rickie Lee Jones: Flying Cowboys; Becca Stevens: Perfect Animal.