Joni’s artful, musical world gets tribute

In her first 79 years, Joni Mitchell has done approximately everything.
She survived polio when she was young and an aneurysm when she was old. She lived in tiny towns in Canada and big cities in the U.S. She smoked, drank, partied. And she became the 13th winner of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Music; the show – 9 p.m. Friday (March 31) on PBS – highlights her as:
— A painter. “The visual side of Joni Mitchell is incredible,” said Ken Ehrlich, the show’s producer. As a backdrop to the performances (James Taylor, Lennox, Ledisi, Herbie Hancock, Brandi Carlile, more), he’s using Mitchell’s paintings; a self-portrait is shown here. “She’s a world-class artist.”
— A songwriter. This is music that “came into my soul …. It’s poetry that is embodied with music,” Lennox told the Television Critics Association.
Lennox discovered it in an ideal way: A teen from the northeast of Scotland, she was studying flute in London and sharing an apartment with a guy who spent all his money on a sound system and albums.
“There I was as this kind of penniless kid, living in a basement,” Lennox said, ‘and I fell in love (with Mitchell’s music). I just fell in love.”
She didn’t realize this was someone a lot like her. Mitchell (then known as Joan Anderson) had been a pale-skinned teen from an obscure corner of the British empire, seeking a place in the bigger world.
She spent her early years in Fort Macleod, an Alberta town of 2,000, where her dad was a pilot and her mom was a teacher. The family moved to North Battleford (about 7,000 people) when she was 5.
This was the only child in a household that was orderly, but also art-oriented, Sheila Weller wrote in “Girls Like Us” (Simon & Schuster, 2008).These may have been the only small-town parents to take someone out of school for the day to see the opera movie “The Tales of Hoffmann.”
Mitchell hung with the few artful-type kids, with an emphasis on dress-up, shows and make-believe. Then, at 10, polio transformed her. She spent six weeks in a hospital and a year being home-schooled.
Paired with a move to Saskatoon (where her dad was a grocer) the former extrovert needed new ways to stand out. “Joni was beautiful and she always looked so well put-together in those little Jackie Kennedy kind of coats and a hair band,” a friend told Weller. “But she was reserved and withdrawn.”
The look was important then. Mitchell wrote a style column in the high school newspaper. After a year as a waitress in a night club (where she made her singing debut), she studied art at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. She was “a bit of a party girl,” a friend told Weller, and was runner-up in the campus beauty pageant.
Then pregnancy drove her deeper inward. She began writing songs, performed often, had her daughter in 1965 in a charity ward in Toronto, surrendered her for adoption, and went on to her new life.
She married Chuck Mitchell, an American singer, and settled in Detroit. At 22, she was modeling with her husband in the Detroit Free Press fashion pages; the Detroit News proclaimed them as tastemakers.
They also had the Chuck and Joni Mitchell duo. They did folk clubs, but her tastes were never confined to one genre. She was a fan of Rachmaninoff, wrote lyrics that were literary poetry and liked jazz. She hired Motown Records sidemen, all with jazz skills, to write lead sheets for her songs.
(Hancock learned about that later, when he was asked to join her 1979 album dealing with the music of jazz master Charles Mingus. “I thought I’d have to dumb things down, not play complicated chords,” he told the TCA. Instead, he found Mitchell was ready for anything. (Later, he convened jazz greats for an album of Mitchell songs; it won the 2008 Grammy as album of the year.)
Mitchell’s success soon outstripped her husband’s. They divorced and she moved East. Variously described as a “thrift-shop fairy princess” and a “prairie girl” who like to bowl, she hit Manhattan.
Judy Collins discovered her and took her to perform at the Newport Folk Festival; David Crosby discovered her and took her to California, where she was surrounded by the Laurel Canyon music guys.
Many of her best-known songs – “Both Sides Now,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Circle Game,” “Help Me” – were written early and re-recorded often. Still, people say Mitchell has continued to write brilliantly; in the Gershwin tribute, Brandi Carlile offers a powerhouse version of the 2007 “Shine.”
That reflects a singer’s admiration for someone almost twice her age. “Brandi Carlile and her friendship with Joni – this is such a beautiful thing,” Lennox said.
After the 2015 aneurysm, the “Joni jams” began. “Brandi was really behind this,” Hancock said. “People would come over, like Chaka Khan …. Wayne Shorter would be there sometimes.”
That was in Mitchell’s home, filled with sights and sounds. “Her artwork is everywhere in that house,” Ehrlich said. “And it’s spectacular.”
Last summer, Carlile engineered the surprise: Mitchell did a full set at the Newport Folk Festival.
And then came the Gershwin Prize. The Joni Jam had moved to Washington, D.C.