Singer Mitchell Biography

Joni Mitchell is a living legend of Folk rock, not very famous in Russia. We talk about Johni's career and explain why it is so important for the history of music - both Fokol and jazz. Subscribe to the telegram channel “How are you? In it, our colleagues mentally and scientifically talk about psychology and self -development, and on weekends will we share fresh collections of films and music there?

The beginning of a career personal tragedy, Joni's youth cannot be called prosperous. She threw a school at 12 years old for parties with friends, at 20 she left the university. Joni had almost no money - she interrupted by random earnings. At the age of 22, the singer gave birth to a daughter and gave her to educate another family, because she herself could not contain.

The next time she saw her daughter already in the nineties. This served as a trigger for creating tragic texts by Mitchell. In the middle of X, Mitchell played the guitar in college, hotels, coffee houses, halls for church assemblies. The novice singer felt like an outcast. During traveling from city to city, the girl found that the folk musicians had divided the traditional repertoire among themselves-each song had the owner, and Johni simply did not allow to perform those compositions that she liked.

Then she began to write her songs. Career Mitchell went in the mountain. He was impressed by Joni's talent, introduced her to his friends from the musical business and agreed with the Reprise label, a Warners subsidiary, signing a contract. And the most important thing Crosby did is Joni's uniqueness. At that time, the pure folk was not in fashion, and the label wanted the Canadian to add more rock to folk music.

However, Crosby convinced Reprise that, if you maintain the individual's individuality, the label would receive a great artist. So the first album Song to a Seagull appeared. Only in one track from it, along with the guitar and piano, the bass sounds - otherwise it is a pure folk. The unique guitar technique of the debut plate designated Mitchell's unique handwriting. At nine years old, Joni suffered polio, due to which her left hand weakened.

When she learned to play the guitar, she had to develop her own style of play, adapted to her physical characteristics. Joni practiced and soon discovered that it was easier to play with a weakened hand if you reconfigure the guitar. Experiments with the guitar system became the basis of Joni Mitchell's music. A lot of her was taught by her colleague Eric Andersen, whom Joni met after moving to Detroit.

The guitar style of Mitchell may seem simple for the uninitiated person, but he was innovative for the music of those years. This is especially true for folk rock, where they are accustomed to traditional harmony. For merits in expanding the capabilities of the guitar, the magazine Rolling Stone put Mitchell to the ninth position in the top of the greatest guitarists in history.

Most of the songs Mitchell composed on a guitar with open or non -standard setting. Canadian used approximately 50 drill. Over time, the system became lower than, which was probably the result of excessive smoking and a change in the vocal range of Joni. She called her loved one a system from the Night Ride Home song, recorded already in the year - Johni never stopped experimenting.

Joni played the same like other single guitarists. She used open major construction, which she overheard in the old blues. In modern music for Mitchell, such a system could be found in the songs of the Rolling Stones blues fanatics. In the debut album of the year, Song to a Seagull has both quarterly and quintal harmony in The Dawntreader, as well as quintal harmony in Song to a Seagull.

Despite the ingenuity of Joni Mitchell, she was not at all popular - unlike her songs. Johni Urge for Going was the first to record the Folk-singer Tom Rush, whom she met in Toronto, and then this composition became a hit performed by the country musician George Hamilton IV. Collins also released the Single of Chelsea Morning in M, and for several years this cover was commercially more successful than the original version of Mitchell.

Peak: Blue album truly Joni's talent was revealed in the Blue album of the year. The meaning of this album is difficult to overestimate-many critics consider the record of one of the best in history and the best of the solo artists among releases. For example, in M ​​Blue took third place in the list of “The Greatest Albums of All Time” by Rolling Stone magazine.

At the beginning of the X, Mitchell became a big star in the USA: her Clouds record was nominated for Grammy as the best folk album, Melody Maker recognized her as the best performer among women in the year, and the songs finally became hits in her own performance-for example, the Big Yello Taxi Nature Gym is in the Billboard chart. The power of this album in its extreme emotional openness.

Mitchell said: “There is not a single dishonest note in the vocals of the Blue album. At that time, I did not have personal protection. I felt like a cellophane wrapping on a pack of cigarettes, I had no secrets from the world, and I could not pretend to be strong or happy. ”The name of the Blue album leads to suspicion that it is dreary and depressed. However, in fact, this is an album of freedom and all the consequences arising from it: from anxiety for the future to new experience.

In the year, Joni Mitchell escaped from family life in Los Angeles. She took the Appalachic instrument of Dulcumer with her, because he is lighter than a guitar, and went on a trip to Europe: Greece, France, Italy. All I Want This song best conveys the mood of the album. Joni, as it were, breaks between the two poles.

On one of them is reflection on the relationship: “I like I hate you, or maybe I love. I love you when I forget about myself. All I want from our love - so that we become better, you and me. " On the other, there is a previously unfamiliar feeling of freedom and the desire to get new from life: “I want to rise and rush to dance, I want to seize all the money in some cheap bar with a musical automatic machine.

Do you want, do you want to dance with me, honey? The laws of show business limited her freedom and the singer thinks whether she needs it. In the environment, Folk and rock were much smaller than men, and the singers - a author of songs and were units at all. Often the texts for the singers were written by men who put their views on life in the lyrics. Joni Mitchell's voice in this choir of male voices was like a naked nerve: other musicians did not allow or they did not allow such a degree of emotionality and sincerity when they talked about female experience.

It was how to be a woman at the beginning of the 20th century and wear trousers - that is, to challenge society and his traditional ideas about femininity. And here, a bard girl instead of cute ballad turns the soul inside out-shock! They imagine that female desires are reduced to cliche like “roses and kisses”. At the same time, the men themselves are dull and boring types that alone get drunk in front of the TV, after they make housewives with a “dishwasher and coffee maker” from yesterday's romantic girls.

California Joni's songs at the beginning of X - a ball of conflicting emotions. In the composition of California, Mitchell first emphasizes that her wanderings in Europe are an escape from negative events. She then says that, despite emotional difficulties, she found on the trip what she needed - impressions, real life, parties with a young Greek, who danced beautifully and prepared deliciously, even in the end she turned out to be a fraudster who stole a camera.

Therefore, Joni returned to California, about which all her thoughts were, because walking alone along unfamiliar streets is quite sad. But at home it turned out to be sad again, so Johni flew to the beaches of Spain. The turn to jazz at the beginning of his career by Joni Mitchell was a typical folk artist: she sang her own songs, played the guitar and combined the folk lyrics and the open system.

In the mid -seventies, she changed her style and began to experiment with unusual rhythms that seemed to envelop her voice and create jazz sound landscapes. Not all fans and critics accepted this. In M magazine, Rolling Stone wrote about The Hissing of Summer Lawns: "There are no melodies that could be discussed." Albums like Mingus pushed part of the audience Mitchell, who considered the singer “pretentious”.

Express - These musicians played a mixture of rock and jazz. In Court and Spark, Johni opened as a jazz vocalist. The record is completed by the composition of Twisted - a jazz standard from the fifties, which is vocalise for a saxophone solo. Song -made, the song acquired folk chamber, but the arrangement sounds coquettishly and playfully, and Johni herself sings as elegantly as if in his youth she performed not in the little Canadian cafes, but on the stage of Broadway.

Johni retained these ease and airiness in any music. Even in the experimental song Dreamland - contrary to the fact that the drum in it sounds like a sorcerer’s weapon, and numerous percussion saturates the track space with random knocks and creaks. At the end of X, Mitchell made friends with the cult jazz smuggles Charles Mingus, an innovator who enriched jazz with elements of classical and African American religious music.

They composed songs together, and Mingus, despite the progressive amyotrophic sclerosis, wrote six melodies for Joni, which she finalized and released in the Mingus album. Together with her, other Jazz legends worked on the album: bassist Jaco Pastorius and keyboardist Herby Hankok, who played his parties on an electric piano. According to Joni, Pastorius became a bassist, who she always needed was a musician who will not only mechanically play a standard party, but will enter with Joni into a dialogue and create an unusual counterpoint between the melody and rhythm.

Work was not going without pastorius: Mingus music retained the sound of X, which is characteristic of Duke Ellington, teacher Charles. Together, Pastorius and Hankok created for Joni one of her most vintage and calm albums. Mingus shows that Mitchell is very carefully treating jazz.Johni herself did not call her songs jazz in the full sense of the word: "The general with a variety of harmonies is common with jazz, but there are laws in the jazz chord movement, and my songs are mainly beyond these laws." This statement is also true in the sense that jazz is gravitating towards improvisation, and Joni Mitchell is not.

This is clearly noticeable in contrast with the energetic work of Mingus, whose songs in the processing of Mitchell turned into balanced and controlled. Johni said that she knocked 3-4 times per song. This is a characteristic feature of the folk - the song should have a clear narrative, and music cannot knock it down. Once, Johni told why Jazz began to play.

She was boring to a conservative tradition, she wanted to make “modern American music” - and she could not exist without mixing genres distant from each other. Some musical experiments by Joni Mitchell became real insight and ahead of time.